Re: [xsl] Finding the position of an ancestor

Subject: Re: [xsl] Finding the position of an ancestor
From: Nicholas Orr <nick@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:11:02 +1100
Thanks Kamal,

Yes, that was something I thought of, but hadn't tried yet. The only issue is that if there are multiple <script> elements, does the position reset each time so that it starts again at 1 for each new group of <Step> elements?

Nick

On 20/12/2005, at 1:53 PM, Kamal Bhatt wrote:

One brute force method would be to have a template that matches step and then in this template call another template that matches for chunk and pass down the value of the position of step to this template.

eg

<xsl:template match="Step">
   <xsl:apply-templates select="descendant::Chunk[@type='FieldRef']">
        <xsl:with-param name="pos" select="position()"/>
    </xsl:apply-templates>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:emplate match="Chunk">
   <xsl:param name="pos"/>
   <!-- Field processing goes here -->
</xsl:template>

Apologies if syntax is incorrect it has been a while since I have done XSLT and I have never used descendant, but hopefully you get at what I am saying. I have done something similar in the past and this was the only way I could do it. If anyone knows of a better way, I would be grateful to find out.

Maybe you can find a way of making this more elegant by going back to the step rather than forward to the chunk and getting the position that way (ie, create a template that gets and prints the position of a step)

Nicholas Orr wrote:

I was wondering if someone can help me work out a position issue I'm struggling with.

I've got some XML that has is in it :

<FMPReport>
<File>
<ScriptCatalog>
<Script>
<StepList>
<Step>
...
</Step>
<Step>
...
</Step>
<Step>
...
</Step>
<Step id="1" name="Perform Script" enable="True">
<Value>
<DisplayCalculation>
<Chunk type="FieldRef">
<Field id="32867" name="cPref Server Temp Folder" table="gPrefs" />


Then in the xslt I run a for each loop

<xsl:for-each select="/FMPReport/File/ descendant::Chunk[@type='FieldRef']/Field">
<xsl:call-template name="RESULTSET" />
</xsl:for-each>


which works fine, and I can get the data I need. I grab the name from the Step using :

<xsl:value-of select="ancestor::Step[1]/@name" />

But how do I grab the step number? For example I want to know that this is step 4 in this script, by counting how many <Step> elements there are in the current <Script> element. I thought it would just be :

<xsl:value-of select="ancestor::Step[1]/ position ()"/>

But that doesn't work, and gives me a parsing error. Am I maybe going about the whole thing wrong?

Thanks,
Nick

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