Re: [xsl] best-technique for selective group and merge?

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2004-03-02 12:38 -0800, James A. Robinson wrote:
> That's amazing. Thank you very much for the solution. I think I understand
> what is going on, but my grasp of non-procedural languages is minimal
> at best.
>
> You're example shows that one can iterate over the unique
> element+attribute combinations by excluding any element+attribute which
> is not the first instance of the given attribute, right?

Close ... I'm not "excluding any e+a which is not the first" ... I'm using 
the first of any given e+a combination as the signal to do *all* of the 
given e+a combination.  The <xsl:if> is a trigger of when to do the work, 
and then I just do the work once with the given criteria.  Any subsequent 
time I do nothing because I assume that I did the work the first time around.

The essence of grouping in XSLT 1.0 is to find a test that is only true 
once, and then do all the work when that test is true and ignore the work 
when the test is false.  That is the premise of each of axis-based, 
variable-based and key-based grouping.

I hope this helps.

...................... Ken


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