Re: [xsl] Do Templates Conflict?

[Brian Chrisman <incubus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 03:03:29PM -0500, Edward Bryant wrote:
> 
> I was wondering if someone can explain why two templates that both apply to 
> a source xml element do not conflict.
> 
> I have one template that applies to all the paragraphs in a document and 
> another that applies only to the first paragraph. I did this assuming it 
> would somehow not work because of the conflict between the templates. 
> However, to my surprise it worked fine. Now, I am even more worried because 
> I don't know why it worked. Can someone explain what is going on?

Reason it probably worked as you expected is because you
probably had two templates like:
match="paragraph"
and
match="paragraph[position() = 1]"

There's a priority scheme for templates which is fairly well
documented in most places where you'd look up template matching
stuff.  Some of the pieces of information which I personally
found most useful:
a) stuff with [] predicates get higher priority 
b) using a '|' doesn't increase priority in and of itself

You can override this priority directly, but I've been burned
a few times in doing that.. generally if I have something which 
I very specifically want called, I'll use a call-template, or
perhaps a mode.

Normally, the calculated priority works well.. and I guess if
I kept the actual values related those calculations in mind
while programming, it might make using priorities more
effective.

Hope this helps.

> 
> Does the order the templates are listed in matter?
> 
> Does it matter that one selected a more specific context?