Question

I have a HTML select dropdown:

                <select name="sortby">
                    <option value=""></option>
                    <option value="onenightavg">Price: High to Low</option>
                    <option value="number_bedrooms">Bedrooms: High to Low</option>
                    <option value="number_bathrooms">Bathrooms: High to Low</option>
                    <option value="max_sleeps">Sleeps: High to Low</option>
                </select>

When the user submits this it sends a URL query string to the page and it gets added to the XML of the page:

<querystring>
 <sortby>number_bathrooms</sortby>
</querystring>

I then set an XSL variable in my XSLT:

        <xsl:variable name="sortby">
            <xsl:choose>
                <xsl:when test="/querystring/sortby != ''">
                    <xsl:value-of select="/querystring/sortby" />
                </xsl:when>
                <xsl:otherwise>
                    <xsl:value-of select="'onenightavg'" />
                </xsl:otherwise>
            </xsl:choose>
        </xsl:variable>

In the above XST I am setting a variable called $sortby and testing whether the querystring exists. If it does exist then set the variable to its value. If it doesn’t exist then default it to “onenightavg”.

Then I use that variable in my sort:

<xsl:sort data-type="number" order="ascending" select="$sortby" />

This doesn’t work. It doesn’t sort my items, but when I hardcode the select to any one of the values like this it works:

<xsl:sort data-type="number" order="ascending" select="onenightavg" />

I would like to be able to dynamically sort based on an the value of the selected option in the dropdown.

Answer 1

How about this:

<xsl:sort data-type="number" order="ascending" select="*[local-name() = $sortby]" />