How to creating a variable containing elements?

[kjforsyth]

Greetings,

I am trying to create variables that contain elements rather than text values.

I have an XML file like this:

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<document>

    <item name='ItemRed'>

        <text>item red text</text>

    </item>

    <item name='ItemYellow'>

        <text>item yellow text</text>

    </item>

    <item name='ItemBlue'>

        <text>item blue text</text>

    </item>

    <item name='ItemGreen'>

        <text>item green text</text>

    </item>

</document>

In my XSL sheet, I want to build 4 variables, one for each <item>. The variables might be something like this:

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<xsl:variable name="itemRed" select="document/item[1]"/>

<xsl:variable name="itemYellow" select="document/item[2]"/>

<xsl:variable name="itemBlue" select="document/item[3]"/>

<xsl:variable name="itemGreen" select="document/item[4]"/>

The problem is that items could be in any order, so I can't hard-code the Xpath. How can I assign each variable to its correct item, regardless of its position in the document?

I would be most grateful for a suggestion here..

Best wishes,

Karl Forsyth

[george]

You can identify the items by testing their name attribute. A better way (from a performance point of view) is to use a key, see below an example with both approaches:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0">

  <xsl:output indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:key name="itemsByName" match="item" use="@name"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">

    <xsl:variable name="itemRed" select="document/item[@name='ItemRed']"/>

    <xsl:variable name="itemYellow" select="document/item[@name='ItemYellow']"/>

    <xsl:variable name="itemBlue" select="document/item[@name='ItemBlue']"/>

    <xsl:variable name="itemGreen" select="document/item[@name='ItemGreen']"/>    

    <result>

      <xsl:copy-of select="$itemBlue"/>

      <xsl:copy-of select="key('itemsByName', 'ItemBlue')"/>

    </result>

  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Best Regards,
George

[kjforsyth]

Just what I needed. Thank you!