RE: [xsl] Advice/feedback on stylesheet?

Subject: RE: [xsl] Advice/feedback on stylesheet?
From: "Jim Stoll" <jestoll@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 16:13:58 -0500
Hi M. David,
Thanks for your reply and example - I look forward to seeing your site! (and I'm glad that I could provide some input to your site, even if in a wholly passive manner... :-)

I definitely learned some things from your response (and am still contemplating a few of them) - I especially like the possibilites associated with building a temporary tree and of using the mode attribute of the select and match conditions - that's a new technique to me and looks to have a lot of very cool uses!  Are there any concerns/drawbacks of taking this type of approach when working with large sets of data? (ie, would memory/resource use possibly be a problem?)

As regards the original problem itself, what I'm trying to do is to provide a generic stylesheet that users can apply to any set of data resulting from a particular type of database query - I'm using Oracle 9.1, which allows hierarchical relational queries (ie, the relational data can be meaningfully represented hierarchically, via level and heritage (specifically, parent) data), and which allows xml-conversion of relational data, but that unfortunately 'flattens' the hierarchical relational data in the process of converting that relational data to XML.  So, in order to do this, I need to have the 'utility' elements that I identified (LEVEL_, ROWID_ and PARENTROWID_ - that establish the depth/heritage in the hierarchy [sidebar: in all actuality, I just need to identify those that are top-level and those that aren't - which now occurs to me that I could do simply based on the presence/absence of a PARENTROWID_ element - but Oracle's CONNECT BY query produces a 'level' value t!
 hat fits the bill nicely] and then I want to be able to generically 're-constitute' the hierarchical nature of _any_ data that is generated via the CONNECT BY (herarchical relational) query (but that is subsequently squashed flat by the XML conversion process).  Thus, I can't reference 'data' elements in the stylesheet (like NODE, SRCD, etc), as I don't know what those will actually be in the generic/runtime use of the stylesheet - I can only rely on the presence of these 'utility' elements that I have predicated as requirements for anyone wishing to use this 'reconstitution' service.

So, any further info/advice that you can provide in the context of this generic/service approach to the problem would be most welcome!

Thanks for the help!!

Jim

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