Question

for example i have following xml input:

<Letter>
  <LetterProductInfo>
    <Paragraph>
        <DisplayOrder>
            20
        </DisplayOrder>
        <Text>
            text abc
        </Text>
    </Paragraph>
  </LetterProductInfo>
</Letter>

<Letter>
    <LetterProductInfo>
    <Paragraph>
        <DisplayOrder>-10</DisplayOrder>
        <Text>
            text kkk
        </Text>
    </Paragraph>
  </LetterProductInfo>
</Letter>

<Letter>
   <LetterProductInfo>
    <Paragraph>
        <DisplayOrder>-20</DisplayOrder>
        <Text>
            text xyz
        </Text>
    </Paragraph>
  </LetterProductInfo>
</Letter>

i need help as to write xsl so that it will loop through all letter nodes and select the Text Based on the DisplayOrder’s value [ I can’t hardcode since i will not know what will the the displayorder id, all i know is that is an integer value]

something like:

<xsl:for-each select="Letter">
   <!--
   missing logic so that xsl:value-of select="?" will print
   1. test xyz - because its DisplayOrderId is -20
   2. text kkk - because its DisplayOrderId is -10
   3. text abc - because its DisplayOrderId is 20
    -->
</xsl:for-each>

Thanks.

Answer 1

If I understand well your question, you want to output a certain string such as:

1. test xyz

for each Letter, but you want Letter elements sorted based on the numerical value of DisplayOrder.

xsl:sort does that for you:

<xsl:for-each select="Letter">
  <xsl:sort select="number(LetterProductInfo/Paragraph/DisplayOrder)"
    data-type="number"/>
  <!-- your code for processing a Letter goes here -->
</xsl:for-each>

Or you can as well do:

<xsl:apply-templates select="Letter">
  <xsl:sort select="number(LetterProductInfo/Paragraph/DisplayOrder)"
    data-type="number"/>
  <!-- your code for processing a Letter goes into a separate xsl:template -->
</xsl:apply-templates>

I suggest you RTFM about xsl:sort at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#xsl-sort

My code here assumes there’s only 1 node returned by LetterProductInfo/Paragraph/DisplayOrder.

NB: for your next question, you might want to be more specific about what you expect as output. I assume you just want string and not HTML, for instance.