Re: [xsl] xsl:for or xsl:repeat

Subject: Re: [xsl] xsl:for or xsl:repeat
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 13:21:10 -0400
At 12:02 PM 5/24/2006, Jon wrote:
I just get bad feelings about systems that are arbitrarly restricted.
Seems so....limiting ;).  Like web forms that don't let me get my full
title in because the assume everyone's title can fit in 10 characters
or something.  One of the perks of a document system like this is that
we can move away from arbitrary restrictions.  But sometimes it's
necessary.

This is all true, but there are times when <xsl:for-each select="//node(position() &lt;= $number)"/> is just so far within the safety zone that a purist solution seems, well, limiting in its own way (since then we end up having to document the recursion, etc.).


The *real* solution would be to have the number of signatures we needed in a more useful form (to XSLT). For example, if a runtime parameter were not an integer '2' (for two signers) but instead a bitty document of some sort that happened to contain one each of a certain set of nodes correlating with the signers (a list of their names or whatever), we might arrange to have a set of nodes we could iterate over safely, instead of a number we'd have to process.

This is both conceptually neat, and scalable outside of artificial concerns like "will the source document ever contain fewer nodes than there may be signers who need signature lines?".

Cheers,
Wendell


====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================

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