Hi all -
I have what I think is a fairly simple problem, but I'm having trouble
with the implementation in XSLT. Any help you could give would be
greatly appreciated.
I have a document which is subdivided into multiple sections, with
each section, in turn, divided into pages as shown below:
<document>
<documentDivision>
... arbitrary content ...
<pagebreak />
... arbitrary content ...
<pagebreak />
</documentDivision>
... arbitrary number of <documentDivision> elements ...
</document>
Each <documentDivision> section of the document can have an arbitrary
number of <pagebreak> elements, and an arbitrary amount of content
between <pagebreak>s.
I'd like to be able to break the input <document> into multiple
<document>s, each of which has the minimum number of
<documentDivision> sections that give it a <pagebreak> count ~100
pages. I'd like to break the input at <documentDivision> boundaries,
but I don't need the output documents to be equally sized or to be
exactly 100 pages long - just as close to that size as I can
reasonably get while maintaining the <documentDivision> boundaries.
So for example if I have an input document that looks like this:
<document>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 50 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 50 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 127 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 5 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 23 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 78 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
</document>
the output documents should look like this, with each output document
being "close" to 100 pages in length:
<!-- This doc has enough <documentDivision> elements to give exactly
100 pages. -->
<document>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 50 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 50 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
</document>
<!-- This doc has a single <documentDivision> element with 127 pages -
close enough! -->
<document>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 127 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
</document>
<!-- This doc has a three <documentDivision> elements of 5, 23 and 78
pages each - close enough! -->
<document>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 5 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 23 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
<documentDivision>
... content containing 78 <pagebreak /> elements ...
</documentDivision>
</document>
I've been able to figure out how to get the number of <pagebreak>s per
<documentDivision> and how to calculate the number of <pagebreak>s in
any given group of <documentDivision> sections, but what I'm not sure
of is how to maintain information about the point at which I last
created a new output document so that I can determine what group of
<documentDivision> elements has a page count around 100 and should
therefore be used to create a new output document. It seems that the
best way to carry this context would be via params to xsl;apply-
templates, but I'm not clear on how to set up the XSLT code so that
the state gets maintained as I iterate through <documentDivision>
elements. It also seems like there should be some XPath expression
that I can use with xsl:for-each-group, but I can't quite figure out
how to write that such that each group has only the minimum number of
<documentDivision> elements needed to accumulate 100-ish pages.
Do you have any guidance on ways to do this? I think I'm just having
a mental block, and a swift kick in the right direction should do the
trick.
Thanks
Chris