Re: [xsl] Count elements A up to any element B in an axis

[Lars Huttar <lars_huttar@xxxxxxx>]

On 11/30/2010 10:09 AM, Christian Roth wrote:
> Hello,
>
> using XSLT 2.
>
> Effectively, I need to determine the level of a (possibly nested) list I
> (=context node) am at. 
>
> I thought I would do this by counting my ancestor list elements A.
> However, certain elements along that axis establish a new level-counting
> context (e.g. a table cell or a footnote, B), so I only want to count
> until such an element first appears in the ancestor chain.
>
> My current solution is
>
> count( 
>   ancestor-or-self::A[ . >> ancestor::node()[self::B or /][1] ] 
>      )
>
> Is this a correct and good way (both in being a generic enough pattern
> to re-use for such problems and performance) to do it, or are there
> better ways?
Christian,
Hopefully someone else will come along with a full recommendation, but I
noticed that in your predicate

[self::B or /]

the '/' part will always return a non-empty sequence, so the predicate
will always be true, and thus useless.
You need to make the '/' part test the context node, so I believe
instead of '/', you want '|self::document-node()'. I.e.

|

[self::B or self::document-node()]

Lars