Re: [xsl] Manipulating elements depending on the existence of sub-elements

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Adil,

At 10:39 AM 3/12/2008, you wrote:
> So basically I want the count to represent the position of a given
> Line within a given Transaction, and in cases where a UniqueInfo
> element is not present (i.e. it's a stub of a transaction), I want the
> line count of that Transaction's following sibling to start where its
> own line count left off, rather than back at 1 (which is what's
> happening currently and what should be happening for all other
> transactions). If this is not possible or more effort than its worth,
> I'd settle for a line count representing the position of the line in
> the context of the entire document (so the count just increments with
> every line). I tried to do the latter by changing the context of
> position(), but it didn't work out too well so any help would be most
> appreciated.

Well the second solution would be quite easy and straightforward: you 
could generate a number for each Line in sequence, in document-wide 
scope and irrespective of containment or order of traversal, with

<xsl:number level="any"/>

called with each Line as current node (that is, inside a template 
matching the Line or in a for-each selecting Lines).

The first requirement is harder, since to calculate the number of 
each Line within its "virtual" Transaction (that is, its current 
Transaction plus all the Transactions preceding it up to, but not 
including, the closest preceding Transaction with a UniqueInfo) means 
being able to collect its proper "actual" Transactions together from 
each Line. This could be done in a single pass, but it won't be 
especially pretty.

It could be done in a second pass quite easily, and you might 
consider this. The first step of your pipeline would rectify your 
Transactions, adopting the orphans (as it were); this would make 
everything in the transformation including the numbering of the lines 
easier for the second step to handle.

Is this an option for you?

Another solution to your problem might be to use a throwaway 
identifier, such as the unique ID produced by the generate-id() 
function for each Line.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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