Altova MapForce review and tips

Altova MapForce is an interesting tool for creating XSL transformations visually.  Looking past the obvious drag-and-drop nature of the tool, here's my review:

What I liked:

• Promotes the creation of libraries of re-usable functions.  
• Flexible:  Can swap in another XSD without losing mappings, by editing MFD file directly.  The invalid mappings will be highlighted in red for correction

What I disliked:

• Generated XSL is not meant to be tweaked, and it would be very difficult to do so
• No built-in debugging facilities
• No support for non-function-based facilities (e.g. xsl:analyze-string)

Hard to say whether good or bad:

• Everything that is re-usable is function-based, that is, consisting of input (optionally) and an output.  It reminds me of Lisp programming.   

 Tips:

• do not copy and paste functions between MFD files using text editor
• make higher-level functions if find repeating mapping
• If parsing the text of a node which has embedded tags (e.g. <addr>PO Box 123<delimiter />c/o Dave<postalCode>90210</postalCode></addr>), in this case, addr and delimiter, respectively, use the MapForce distinct-values function