Re: [xsl] Attributes and Axis

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Antonio,

At 11:58 AM 4/13/2006, you wrote:
> Hi all:
>
> I'm trying to navigate thru the attributes of a element, but no
> success. Something like
>
>         <xsl:template match="@*">
>                 <xsl:if test="following-sibling::attribute()">
>
>                 </xsl:if>
>         </xsl:template>
>
> meaning if there is more attributes for this node...

Right. This won't work since attributes don't have siblings. They 
have parents, but since they aren't children of their parents, they 
aren't siblings of the other attributes.

> But ofcourse that wont work...
>
> I finnaly made what i want using
>
>       <xsl:when test="position()=last()">

This works because when attributes are selected they are assigned a 
context position, so there will be a last one -- but which one it is, 
is up to the processor, since attributes are not ordered in the data model.

> But what if i need to use axis with attributes? Or there arent't axis
> with attributes? If so, how can i refrence other attributes on the
> same element?

This is one place where XSLT 1.0 gets dicey. You can say ../@* to get 
all the attributes on an element, starting from one of them. To get 
all the *other* attributes, however, you more or less have to use an 
explicit name test, as in "../@*[not(name()=name(current())]", which 
is admittedly fairly ugly.

In XPath 2.0 you can say ../@*[not(. is current())] which is a bit 
better, if not much.

To say more, we'd have to know more about why you're asking.

In general, these limits reflect the "second-class" status of 
attributes in the XML/XSLT paradigm. Assuming your XML is 
well-designed, this is mostly a good thing (attributes are easily 
hidden or ignored, etc.): when something is "first-class" it should 
be an element. I do understand that much XSLT is written to 
ameliorate badly-designed XML.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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