Re: [xsl] "Tunneling" a parameter in document order

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Christian,

As Andrew indicates, we can't give good specific advice without 
something specific to work with.

On the other hand, I can report that in general your solution #2, 
pipelining, does work well. First, traverse your document top-down or in 
whatever order you need (for example, a sibling-to-sibling traversal is 
sometimes useful), passing a (tunnel) parameter to perform the count; as 
you go, copy the document and add a new attribute to every element that 
needs one, capturing the value of the count at that point. Bind the 
result to a variable, and apply templates to this temporary tree in a 
second pass.

Using this method, your counting logic will be expressed by means of 
template matches in the mode used in your first pass. These templates 
will control the details of the traversal as well as where and how the 
counter is incremented and/or reset, or not, as appropriate.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Wendell

On 4/12/2012 1:20 PM, Christian Roth wrote:
> Hello,
>
> in XSLT 2, tunneling a parameter works in the template call nesting order only.
>
> Is there a recommended design pattern for "tunneling" a parameter along the source document order? I know that this is essentially a variable as in procedural programming, and that a solution cannot be expected directly from XSLT core.
>
> The use-case at hand is that I need to maintain an item counter "variable" along the source document flow from top to bottom. This item counter may:
>
> - be incremented at certain nodes preceding the current (=context) node, at any(!) level in the element hierarchy of the document
> - be (non-sequentially) re-set to a different value at certain nodes (based on their respective context)
>
> And even more specifically: I need to re-create Word's internal list item numbering algorithm off from on an instance of OOXML, which would allow me to construct the actual list item marker text for any list item in the document the same way as it would be displayed when shown in Word.
>
> I cannot use<xsl:number>  since the numbering hierarchy is not related to the element hierarchy in the document.
>
> Ideas so far:
>
> 1. Count relevant preceding:: nodes up to one that sets the numbering value to some defined value. I'd have to perform this query (which may be quite "heavy", as it needs to calculate the complex condition if a certain node satisfies a numbering reset condition for each node considered) often, i.e. for each preceding candidate list item for each list item in the document.
>
> 2. Perform the task in multiple steps by first annotating the source document with pre-calculated numbering attributes in a helper-namespace on the relevant nodes (reset condition, numbering level of the reset), then in a second step use simpler code to produce the final numbering.
>
> 3. Not use XSLT, but re-implement the numbering algorithm in some other language (like Java), have it run on the document tree in document-order over the document and annotate the nodes, then proceed as in 2) with a further step.
>
> How do you go about such problems in general? Is there a best practice?
>
> Regards, Christian

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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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