Re: [xsl] alternate row color in a table

[Jason Trépanier <jtrepanier@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

How can a real "alternate row color in XSLT" be done??
I'll outline the problems with examples below, but I am hoping
someone will offer a solution to this problem.


The problem with using position() to alternate rows; is that if you are 
doing a query
on the data, you are not getting the data order. Selectively choosing data 
will mess up
the row colors because there are missing positions.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>
<xsl:output method="html" encoding="ISO-8859-1" indent="yes"/>

<xsl:param name="keyword">none</xsl:param>

<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:for-each select="//books">
    <xsl:sort order="ascending" select="title"/>
    <xsl:if test="title/*= $keyword">
    <table width="100%"  border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
	<tr class="myBkgnd_{position()  mod 2}">

        <td width="*" class="pad">
            <xsl:value-of select="title" />
        </td>
    </tr>
    </table>
    </xsl:if>
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

if you pass this a keyword, it will display the results, however, seeing
as how the results are not in sequential order, the position() does not work
as one may wish. You will end up with several <tr>'s that are style1 and
several <tr>'s that are style2 (in whatever order).

so lets take an example

say you have an xml file with this

<books>
	<title>Book A</title>
	<title>Pamphlet 1</title>
	<title>Book B</title>
	<title>Book C</title>
	<title>Pamphlet 2</title>
</books>

and your keyword is "Book", the results will show

Book A (with style1) - actual position value = 1
Book B (with style1) - actual position value = 3
Book C (with style2) - actual position value = 4