Re: [xsl] XSL with multiple levels

[Mike Brown <mike@xxxxxxxx>]

Adam Cohen wrote:
> I'm rather new to XSL, and was hoping that someone could help me
> with the following problem:
> 
> I have an XML file that describes various items for a computer store, things 
> like hard drives, optical drives, network cards, etc.  Each item has the 
> same attribute list, and are grouped under elements such as <hard_disk>, 
> <video_card>, etc.  But in some instances, I have further sub-categorized 
> items under their respective manufacturer, if a given company makes more 
> than one item.  For example, for video cards, let's say I have brand_s and 
> brand_t. Brand_s only makes one type of video card, so I put that directly 
> under the <video_card> element.  But brand_t makes two types of video cards, 
> so I create a new element called <brand_t_vid_card> and below that I have 
> both of the video cards made by brand_t, such as <video_card_type_1> and 
> <video_card_type_2>.  Now, I want to use an XSL to translate this XML file 
> into one large HTML file, listing all of the different components, but I run 
> into a problem when I use a simple <xsl:for-each select="component/*/*/*"> 
> statement, since this will only traverse down 3 levels from the <component> 
> element, but in some cases (as noted above), I'll need to traverse further 
> down to the next element.  I'm sure there is an easy way to do this, but I 
> have only limited knowledge of XSL, and I would rather not have to 
> restructure the entire XML file so that it works with my single for-each 
> statement. If anyone can make sense of what I'm talking about, I would 
> greatly appreciate an answer. Below is an example of my XML file to further 
> make my question more clear.  Thanks in advance!

Not the most sensible XML, but you knew that.

If you can say what test you can subject a component/*/*/* element to that
makes it clear whether to use that element itself or its child elements, it
shouldn't be too difficult. Perhaps the presence of the 'manufacturer'
attribute can be the test. Take the union of the ones that have a manufacturer
and the ones that are children of those that don't.

component/*/*/*[@manufacturer] | component/*/*/*[not(@manufacturer)]/*

or perhaps more simply

component/*/*/descendant::*[@manufacturer]

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________________
  mike j. brown                   |  xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/
  denver/boulder, colorado, usa   |  resume: http://skew.org/~mike/resume/

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