Re: [xsl] Processing IDREFS attributes

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2005-11-01 13:00 -0800, Dan Vint wrote:
> I've got a few places where I have an attribute of type IDREFS and a 
> sequence of ID values like references="Location Party Organization". 
> I had thought a simple for-each loop would pull these apart with the 
> id() function, in something like this:
>
> <xsl:for-each select="id(@references)">
>         <xsl:value-of select="."/>
> </xsl:for-each>

Close ....

> But it doesn't work. What I get is the content of @references with the above.

Really?  I would have thought you'd get the concatenation of the 
element content of the referenced elements.

> The only other solution I have thought about is creating a template 
> and recursively pulling apart the string. This should work, but I 
> would think there is a simpler way to make this work. Is there a 
> solution I missed?

*If* you have properly declared the id attributes, for my example 
they are called id=, something along the lines of:

  <!ATTLIST foo id ID #IMPLIED>

then you should be able to say:

  <xsl:for-each select="id(@references)/@id">
    <xsl:if test="position()>1"> </xsl:if>
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:for-each>

and it would report a space-separated list of unique token values 
(rather than just @references since that might have duplicates).

If you don't have a declaration of the attribute type, then id() has 
nothing to look up and will always return an empty node set.

I hope this helps, Dan.

. . . . . . . . . Ken

--
World-wide on-site corporate, govt. & user group XML/XSL training.
G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/
Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0    +1(613)489-0999 (F:-0995)
Male Cancer Awareness Aug'05  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/bc
Legal business disclaimers:  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/legal