Re: [xsl] determine the number of payment methods and specify order depending on page type being viewed

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Caroline,

Just to gloss something I just wrote, in order to make it clear:

At 10:26 AM 11/4/2008, I wrote:
> If you want to fix the order of the children of 'paymentMethods', you can do:
>
> <xsl:template match="paymentMethods">
>   <ul>
>     <xsl:apply-templates select="directDebit"/>
>     <xsl:apply-templates select="creditCard"/>
>     <xsl:apply-templates select="invoice"/>
>   </ul>
> </xsl:template>

The deal here is that if you have no 'creditCard' element in your 
'paymentMethods', for example, then none will be selected and no 
template will be applied, hence no 'li' element will be generated for 
it. This handles all the conditional processing needed, in effect 
testing whether the 'creditCard' element is present (and creating 
nothing for it if it isn't).

This is why, using the apply-templates approach to your problem, you 
don't have to do any explicit testing to see whether all three 
elements are present, or only two (and which two), or only one (and 
which one), or none at all.

Also, because the order of their appearance has been fixed (if they 
are present at all), the possible permutations in assigning the value 
to the li/@class in the result are also reduced -- which is lucky for 
you, since those values are themselves sensitive to the order.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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