Question

First post here!

Ok.. I have a contact XML as follows:

<contact>
  <item>
    <ContactData type="String">[phone]</ContactData>
    <Type type="String">1</Type>
  </item>
  <item>
    <ContactData type="String">[phone]</ContactData>
    <Type type="String">3</Type>
  </item>
  <item>
    <ContactData type="String">[e-mail]</ContactData>
    <Type type="String">4</Type>
  </item>
  <item>
    <ContactData type="String">[phone]</ContactData>
    <Type type="String">2</Type>
  </item>
</contact>

As you can see type 4 is an e-mail, type 1 is a telephone number, type 2 is a fax and type 3 is a mobile number.

So here’s my scenario:

I (probably) need to iterate through all these nodes. Check to see if there is a telephone number (highest priority) and choose it. If there’s no telephone number we need to check for mobile number (second highest priority). If mobile number is not available we choose e-mail (or we do nothing). How can I achieve it?

Thanks..

Answer 1

One way to achieve this could be to simply iterate over the item elements with an xsl:for-each, with a sort on the value of the Type element. Then you can simply pick the first element.

Here is the full XSLT

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
   <xsl:output method="text" indent="yes"/>

   <xsl:template match="contact">
      <xsl:for-each select="item[ContactData != '']">
         <xsl:sort select="Type" order="ascending" />
         <xsl:if test="position() = 1">
            <xsl:value-of select="ContactData" />
         </xsl:if>
      </xsl:for-each>
   </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

When applied to your sample XML, the following is output

[phone]

If you were to blank out the phone number, it should return the mobile number instead. Blank that out too, and the email address is returned.

EDIT: If you need to exclude the fax number, you could change the xsl:for-each to the following:

<xsl:for-each select="item[Type != '2'][ContactData != '']">

Or if you wanted to explicity state only phone, mobile or email, then you could do the following

<xsl:for-each select="item[Type = '1' or Type = '3' or Type = '4'][ContactData != '']">