RE: Alternate bg colors for table and address summaries

["Paul Essex" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 15:51:13 EDT
>From: "Robert Saylor" <rrsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Alternate bg colors for table and address summaries

>Here is the dilemma,
>I want to have one summary return with a grey background and the other
>summary with a white background.

>Ive tried the position function and have had no luck perhaps its me as im
>new at this?

I think you're on the right track with the position function, although I
didn't see that code in the stylesheet you included with your message.

Take a look at page 367 in Michael Kay's XSLT book.  The very last entry in
the Examples table shows this method of determining whether a node's
position is even:

item[position() mod 2 = 0]

Use this in an xsl:when test something like this:

<xsl:choose>
  <xsl:when test="Summary[position() mod 2 = 0]>
    <xsl:call-template name="bgcolorgrey"/>
  </xsl:when>
  <xsl:otherwise>
    <xsl:call-template name="bgcolorwhite"/>
  </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

You can then create two named templates to create the table rows, one
implementing a gray background and the other implementing a white
background.

I thought about a simpler way to do this, which would be to simply do the
test and set a variable value to the desired color, then use the variable
for the 'bgcolor' attribute of the <tr> tag.  I'm not sure if that would
work, though.  I'd be concerned if the variable would stay in scope after
you exit the xsl:choose, and I'm also not sure if it would be recreated for
each node processed in the xsl:for-each (although I think it would).
Perhaps someone more experienced than I am can comment on that.

Hope that helps!


Paul Essex
Software Developer
Bridgeway Software, Inc.





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