[xsl] document tree fragments

[Joe Barwell <jbar@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

XSLT 1.0 (i.e. Firefox 3.0, etc.)
XSLT 2.0 solutions not suitable.

I have a working xsl stylesheet that transforms an xml file with the
structure:

< wines >
	< wine >...< /wine >+
< /wines >

I want, now, to rewrite my xsl stylesheet to work with a collection of 
xml files, each of which contain an individual < wine > element--i.e. in 
place of the single xml < wines > file.

I have succeeded, but with two problems. Firstly, I am unable to 
separately specify the directory path of the files. Here is my "base" 
xml file's content:

<docs path="jb">
	<doc filename="jb/wine1.xml" />
	<doc filename="jb/wine2.xml" />
	<doc filename="jb/wine3.xml" />
	...
</docs>

Note that I have provided the directory path within the @filename 
attribute, but I would prefer to retrieve it from the @path attribute.

Here is the part of my xsl stylesheet that retrieves the contents of my 
collection of xml files:

<xsl:template match="/docs">
	<xsl:variable name="thePath" select="@path" />
	<xsl:variable name="theWines" select="document(doc/@filename)/wine" />
...

Is there a way to use my $thePath variable, instead of including the 
directory path inside the @filename attribute? I tried to concatenate, 
but without success. I want to deal with all my xml files together, 
rather than using a for-each loop, because of several aggregate 
processes that I want to apply.


Secondly, I'm not sure I fully understand what my $theWines variable now 
contains. I believe it is a collection of tree fragments--i.e. there's 
no single top-most node, is that right? Or is there an implicit / 
(document) node?

The reason I ask is because I have some templates that rely on 
processing the preceding axis, and whereas my templates work fine for my 
< wines > xml file, they do not produce the anticipated results when 
using my $theWines variable.

This template works with the < wines > xml file, and is called by 
another template that has already matched the "wines" node:

<xsl:template name="winesByCountry">
	<table border="1">
	<xsl:for-each 
select="wine/countries/country[not(name=../../preceding-sibling::wine/countries/country/name)]">
	<xsl:sort select="name" order="ascending" />
	<xsl:variable name="countryName" select="name" />
	<tr><th><xsl:value-of select="$countryName" /></th><td>
	<xsl:value-of select="count(/wines/wine/countries/country[name = 
$countryName])" /></td></tr>
	</xsl:for-each>
	</table>
</xsl:template>


The following template does not work. It outputs each country multiple 
times--e.g. 2 wines from Italy are output twice as:

Italy 2
Italy 2

rather than the second time correctly seeing that that country is 
already present in a preceding node:

<xsl:template name="winesByCountry">
	<xsl:param name="theWines" />
	<table border="1">
	<xsl:for-each 
select="$theWines/countries/country[not(name=preceding::country/name)]">
	<xsl:sort select="name" order="ascending" />
	<xsl:variable name="countryName" select="name" />
	<tr><th><xsl:value-of select="$countryName" /></th><td>
	<xsl:value-of 
select="count($theWines/countries/country[name=$countryName])" /></td></tr>
	</xsl:for-each>
	</table>
</xsl:template>


Do I need to wrap the sequence of tree fragments in my $theWines 
variable inside a node? I tried using the following:

<xsl:variable name="theWines">
	<wines>
	<xsl:value-of select="document(doc/@filename)/wine" />
	</wines>
</xsl:variable>


but Firefox says: Error during XSLT transformation: An XPath expression 
was expected to return a NodeSet.

Sorry for the length. Any suggestions?

Cheers!

Joe