Re: [xsl] Looking for a concise way of specifying an conditional attribute in output

[John McGowan <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree Brandon,

It's easy to forget about those other instructions when value-of does
95% of what you need to do, and its name, "value-of" doesn't
necessarily imply the limitations that it has.

/John

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Brandon Ibach
<brandon.ibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On this note, it seems to me that xsl:value-of is one of the most
> misunderstood instructions for novices.  For that matter, even more
> experienced users seem to use it in places where xsl:apply-templates,
> xsl:copy-of or, in XSLT 2.0, xsl:sequence might be better choices.
>
> I'd kind of like to see XSLT provide an alternative in the form of
> allowing the "select" attribute on xsl:text with the same effect as on
> xsl:value-of.  This would be a) slightly more concise, b) in line with
> other node-type instructions, such as xsl:attribute, and c) more
> descriptive (IMHO) of the result, in that "text" suggests that the
> result will be a string, rather than the more ambiguous "value".  I
> dare say XSLT might even consider deprecating xsl:value-of in favor of
> this, for the relatively few (compared to how often it seems to be
> used, today) cases where this particular functionality is needed.
>
> -Brandon :)
>
>
> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 4:06 PM, John McGowan <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Thank you Andrew, Michael and Ken!
>>
>> I use value-of so much I forgot about it's impact on "non-strings".
>> This information also helped me with a very similar issue I just ran
>> into today where I was writing a function that was returning a boolean
>> true or false, but it was always true... because value-of was turning
>> it into a string.
>>
>> /John
>>
>> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 3:25 AM, Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>>>> <option value="{@value}>
>>>>  <xsl:value-of select="isSelected(@value,something)">
>>>>  other stuff
>>>> </option>
>>>>
>>>> with a reusable function like this
>>>>
>>>> <xsl:function name="isSelected">
>>>>  <xsl:param name="v1"/>
>>>>  <xsl:param name="v2"/>
>>>>  <xsl:if test="$v1 eq $v2"><xsl:attribute name="selected"
>>>> select="'selected'" /></xsl:if>
>>>> </xsl:function>
>>>>
>>>
>>> As has been said you need xsl:sequence or xsl:copy-of to get the whole
>>> node not just the value of the node, but you could also make that
>>> function a little more generic to create any attribute:
>>>
>>> <xsl:function name="f:createAtt">
>>>  <xsl:param name="name"/>
>>>  <xsl:param name="value"/>
>>>  <xsl:attribute name="{$name}" select="$value"/>
>>> </xsl:function>
>>>
>>> and then call it passing the the name value pair for the attribute,
>>> and put the condition in a predicate:
>>>
>>> <foo>
>>>  <xsl:sequence select="f:createAtt('foo', 'bar')[current()/@value =
>>> $something]"/>
>>>
>>>
>>> cheers
>>> andrew
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Andrew Welch
>>> http://andrewjwelch.com
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> /John
>
>



--
/John