Multiple Views.

Hi. I have an interesting question. One that I hope can be solved with XSL. I
want to take some XML source and generate different views on it using just XSL.
For example, if I have a list of projects with each project containing employee
elements noting which employees are currently working on the project, I would
like to generate a list for each employee detailing what projects they are
currently involved in.

Here's an example XML source:

<projects>
  <project>
    <name>Project X</name>
    <employee>Alice</employee>
    <employee>Bob</employee>
  </project>
  <project>
    <name>Project Y</name>
    <employee>Bob</employee>
  </project>
  <project>
    <name>Project Z</name>
    <employee>Bob</employee>
    <employee>Carol</employee>
  </project>
</projects>

Now I can use the following XSL document to generate an HTML report of all the
projects that Bob is currently working on:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl";>

<xsl:template match="projects">
<html><head><title>Bob's Projects</title></head><body><ul>
  <xsl:for-each select="project[employee='Bob']">
    <li><xsl:value-of select="name"/></li>
  </xsl:for-each>
</ul></body></html>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

I could repeat the above by manually changing 'Bob' to 'Alice' or 'Carol' but
that would get exceedingly cumbersome if there were any more employees. Imagine
a large company with hundreds. So what I'd like to be able to do is get a list
of employees from the projects source. Then, take each of those employees in the
list and perform the above operation. I don't think this is possible with XSL,
however.

My first problem is how do I get a list employees where each employee is only
listed once? Even if all I wanted was to generate a list of each employee's name
using the above source, Bob would show up three times. Is there some sort of
modifier that could be used in a select pattern like:

<xsl:for-each select="unique(employee)">

I imagine the above function would only return Bob the first time he was
encountered. All subsequent Bob's would be skipped. Is this an unreasonable
feature to request for the final recommendation? By the way, how do you go about
requesting features, anyways?

My second problem: Let's say I am able to extract a list containing one element
for each employee. Is there any way to iterate through this list while using
each element as an argument to the above operation which might be implemented as
a macro? And if I want to output the results for each employee to a seperate
file? Am I asking too much?

Thanks,
Jason Diamond





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