Hey Mike,
To cross with another thread --
At 10:05 AM 9/21/2007, you wrote:
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" ...
If you are using XSLT 2.0 I strongly recommend you investigate its
native grouping facilities before investing too much energy into the
Muenchian method, which is essentially a hand-made implementation of
an algorithm to handle processing semantics that could have been much
more deeply embedded in the language -- and which now, in XSLT 2.0, have been.
This having been said, what you are now doing isn't (yet) a
full-blown example of the Muenchian method. So far as I can see, it's
simply the (appropriate) use of a key to perform node traversal
according to an association between nodes.
It seems to me that Ken has done his usual fine work analyzing your
stylesheet, but there's one other possible problem I see:
<xsl:template
match="Subject_AreaProps/Referenced_Entities_Array/Referenced_Entities">
<included-table>
<xsl:value-of select="text()"/>
<xsl:for-each select="key('entity-id','@id')">
... you'd probably want select="key('entity-id',@id)". At present,
you are using the string value "@id" as your key value -- probably
not what you want.
It also appears that the basic issues you're having relate to the
XSLT processing model -- how nodes are matched by templates and
processed, and most especially how they're matched by templates and
processed by default, even if you have no explicit logic for doing
so. That's why Ken advises you also to read up on the built-in templates.
One thing I have students work out when they're at this stage is to
run a stylesheet that *has no templates* and see if they can explain
why they get the output they do.
The next thing I often have them do is try a stylesheet that has only
a single template, which matches a single type of element deep in
their tree. For example, you could have
<xsl:template match="Referenced_Entities">
<boo>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</boo>
</xsl:template>
... and then explain the results of that. (Some people find the first
task much easier after they've tried the second.)
It gets even more interesting if you had a second template to the mix:
<xsl:template match="Subject_AreaProps">
<bah>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</bah>
</xsl:template>
The key to all of it is in seeing what the templates are doing
*together* -- which includes those helpful (but invisible) built-in templates.
Any XSLTer who can't tell you what you'll get and why is either still
a beginner, or a poser. :-)
Cheers,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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