[xsl] Count - via database or xsl

["Mark Williams" <mark@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

We pass XML data to an XSLT stylesheet, sometimes the XML data can be quite
large will contain repeating data from a detail table.

Occasionally we may need to test the size of the repeating data outside of a
for-each statement, by requesting a count of the child nodes.  What we will
usually want to know is whether there are 0 nodes although sometimes we may
need to know the actual number of the count if there are more.   As the data
is being passed via a database to the xml file, I have assumed it would be
much quicker for the database to do the count for us.  Is this a correct
assumption?  Is the xslt count a lot slower than an efficient database
application in this respect?

TIA

Mark Williams


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