Re: [xsl] A general <xsl:key> question.

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Do keys have to be used within a context in which the associated nodes
> exist?

I'm not sure I parsed that correctly, but..

key() like id() will only ever return nodes that are in teh same
document as the current node. If you use document() or a xx:node-set()
extension then these things are new documents.

The usual idiom (I believe there is an example in the xslt spec)

is if you are processing document a and want to look up a key in
document b then you do

<xsl:for-each select="document('b')">
  <xsl:copy-of select="key(....
</xsl:for-each>

Note the for-each is just looping over a list of 1, just to move the
current node to the other document. of course if you are doing that a
lot you can define $bdoc to be "document('b') and use
$bdoc instead of calling document() each time.

David

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