Re: [xsl] variable question

[Jeni Tennison <jeni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Bruce,

> Is there some obvious reason why the "title-before" variable below
> doesn't work when called from within a template?

It depends on what you mean by "doesn't work". Does it give you an
error, give you no output, or give you output that you don't expect?
You haven't shown how the variable is "called" from within the
template, and I'm not sure whether these variable declarations are
global or declared within the template itself. Without this
information, it's hard to debug.

> I'm not sure if the problem is that there's something wrong with the
> way I'm trying to use variables, or something about the context and
> the xpath expressions (my guess is the latter).

Well, there's:

>      <xsl:when test="not[mods:relatedItem[@type='host']]">

Which should presumably be:

  not(mods:relatedItem[@type = 'host'])
     ^                                ^

Unless you have some <not> elements that might have mods:relatedItem
children, which I'm guessing you don't.

Aside from that, the $reftype variable will only be set to what you
expect if the <mods:relatedItem> elements are children of the current
node at the point the $reftype variable is declared. It almost
certainly won't work if these variables are declared globally, for
example, since in that case the current node is the root node (and I
don't think the <mods:relatedItem> elements are document elements).

You could set the $title-before variable with:

<xsl:variable name="title-before">
  <xsl:if test="$reftype = 'chapter'"></xsl:if
</xsl:variable>

and it would do the same thing.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/