Question

I have a simple task that I can’t find a solution for, and I’m new enough to xsl that I don’t how to go about it. I have a list of nodes, and at the first occurrence of the nodes I would like to print a header. E.g.:

xml excerpt

<data>
    <subdata1>value1.1</subdata1>
    <subdata2>value1.2</subdata2>
</data>
<data>
    <subdata1>value2.1</subdata1>
    <subdata2>value2.2</subdata2>
</data>
<data>
    <subdata1>value3.1</subdata1>
    <subdata2>value3.2</subdata2>
</data>

I would like the output to be something like:

Subdata1    Subdata2
value1.1    value2.1
value2.1    value2.2
value3.1    value2.3

There will be stuff before the first “data” node, so I don’t think I can just print it out ahead of time. I was thinking of an if statement with a flag that would be set the first time it finds data, but my implementation wasn’t working. Any ideas on how to do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This transformation:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output method="text"/>
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

 <xsl:template match="data[1]">
  <xsl:text>subdata1&#9;subdata2</xsl:text>
  <xsl:apply-templates select="../data" mode="process"/>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="data" mode="process">
  <xsl:value-of select="concat('&#xA;', subdata1, '&#9;',subdata2)"/>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="data"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when applied on the following XML document (the provided XML fragment, wrapped into a single top element to become a well-formed XML document):

<t>
    <data>
        <subdata1>value1.1</subdata1>
        <subdata2>value1.2</subdata2>
    </data>
    <data>
        <subdata1>value2.1</subdata1>
        <subdata2>value2.2</subdata2>
    </data>
    <data>
        <subdata1>value3.1</subdata1>
        <subdata2>value3.2</subdata2>
    </data>
</t>

produces the wanted, correct result:

subdata1    subdata2
value1.1    value1.2
value2.1    value2.2
value3.1    value3.2

Explanation: Appropriate use of templates and modes.