Re: [xsl] Hopefully not a terribly silly question

[Trevor Nash <tcn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Morgan,

You are trying to fish out the column name every time you need it.
Better to make a list of them once in a global variable:

<xsl:variable name="col-names" select="/result/row[1]/column/@name" />
<!-- that gives you a node-set with the name attributes in document
order -->

Then instead of
>                    <xsl:value-of select="concat('/result/row[1]/column[', position(),']/@name')"/>                             
try
                <xsl:variable name="col-no" select="position()" />
                <xsl:value-of select="$col-names[$col-no]" />

to give you the name of the current column.  (Don't put position()
directly, because it changes its value according to the context).

>Unfortunately,  I get a the literal string result of the concat() 
>function, instead of the actual data value.  Is there some sort of 
>eval() function that I need to use?  Am I approaching this incorrectly? 
>  I know that XSL is quite a paradigm shift from traditional programming 
>methods.

True.  You can improve this a lot by letting templates do the work for
you instead of explicitly navigating the source tree.  I also think
you are going to miss the first row of data: you want to print the
column headings *and* the values on the first row, not just the names.

There isn't a standard 'eval' function BTW, though some processors
have it as an extension function.

Regards,
Trevor Nash
--
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