RE: Sorting revisited (<xsl:sort>)

[r.mcarthur@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Thanks,  I guess my simplification of my source code introduced a lot of
errors.  What I actually have (and actually works!) is a document like this:
<doc>
<headers>
	<header>....</header>
</headers>
<orderdata>
	<variable tags>...</variable tags>
</orderdata>
<orderdata>
	...
</orderdata>
... many more <orderdata> ...
</doc>

The portion that does the sorting is this:

<xsl:template match="doc">
   <TABLE ... >
      <xsl:apply-templates select="child::headers />
      <xsl:apply-templates select="child::orderdata >
         <xsl:sort select="*[local-name()=string($sortby)]"
data-type="$datatype" order="$orderby" />
      </xsl:apply-templates>
    </TABLE>
</xsl:template>

The 'select' attribute works fine.  Its the data-type="$datatype" and
order="$orderby" which don't work.  They are supposed to be attribute value
lists, and I guess I just don't get the syntax.

Rob McArthur

-----Original Message-----
From: David Carlisle [mailto:davidc@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 1999 1:58 PM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Sorting revisited (<xsl:sort>)



I'll try again:-)

You haven't said what your input document looks like, but I'd guess
that it doesn't match the paths in your select expression.

<xsl:template match="/">
	<!-- snip -->
	<xsl:apply-templates>

so this apply templates applies to children of the root node.
There must be exactly one such child, and so xsl:sort has only got
a list of length one to sort.


You probably want to use

<xsl:template match="xxx">

where xxx is your document element.

If you do that then 

the apply templates applies to all the children of the document node.
 <xsl:sort select="*[local-name()=string($sortby)]"

is executed with those children being the current node, this the top
level sortby parameter should name a grandchild of the root, otherwise
the sort key will be null all the time.

If you want to use a sort key that returns a non null value for
the elements named by  $sortby you might want ti use

 <xsl:sort select="self::*[local-name()=string($sortby)]"

David


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