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Re: [xsl] Integrated sort using different elements

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Hi Ken,

Thanks for the tip. A bit earlier, I tried the

<xsl:sort select="
( monogr/author, analytic/author, monogr/editor, monogr/title )[1]"/>

and it produced some kind of weird results. First it listed the ones with analytic/author but no monogr/author. Then the ones with a monogr/title, and no author anywhere. Then it alphabetized all the ones with monogr/author. (In my smaller test set, there didn't happen to be any editors.)

I'm not sure what's happening there, but when I did:
<xsl:sort select="concat(monogr[1]/author[1], analytic[1]/author[1], monogr[1]/editor[1], monogr[1]/title[1])"/>
([1]'s because there's sometimes multiple editions with multiple authors)

it sorted everything the way I needed it. I'm not sure if the data happens to be such that the concat() problem you mentioned doesn't come up, but one way or another it works.

Thanks everyone for your help! This has really been a life saver.

~Quinn


G. Ken Holman wrote:

At 2009-02-19 10:13 -0600, Quinn Dombrowski wrote:

I'm using 2.0 (sorry, I should've mentioned that), so I'll try Michael's solution and let you know how it goes...

Before you do so, Quinn .....

At 2009-02-19 10:19 -0500, I wrote:

In XSLT 2.0, choose the first item in a sequence of many items, priority indicated by the order of your sequence:

<xsl:sort select="
 ( monogr/author, analytic/author, monogr/editor, monogr/title )[1]"/>

At 2009-02-19 15:47 +0000, Michael Kay wrote:

Would it work to sort on the concatenation? -

<xsl:sort select="concat(monogr/author, analytic/author, monogr/editor,
monogr/title"/>

I think the sequence solution is safer than the concatenation solution because if more than one field is present, then the initial characters of a following field, tacked on to the final characters of a preceding field, will but the record out of order.

Consider the following:

<biblStruct id="b1">
  <monogr>
    <author>abc</author>
    ...
  <analytic>
    <author>xyz</author>
  ...
<biblStruct id="b2">
  <monogr>
    <author>abcdef</author>

Using the sequence approach would put "b1" before "b2" in the result because "abc" is before "abcdef", while using the concatenation approach would put "b2" before "b1" in the result because "abcdef" is before "abcxyz".

I hope this illustrates an important issue that was neglected in your decision.

. . . . . . . . . . Ken

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