Question

I have got an answer from my last question about translating an XML file and it inspired me to play with it. I came up with a different solution, but I have the feeling that the two last selects are suboptimal. Can this be done in a nicer way or more efficient?

The stylesheet:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

  <xsl:param name="pFrom" select="'en'"/>
  <xsl:param name="pTo" select="'de'"/>


  <xsl:variable name="translations" select="document('translations.xml')"/>

  <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="@name">
    <xsl:variable name="thisname" select="." />

    <xsl:variable name="entry" select="$translations/translations/entry[attribute::node()[name()=$pFrom and $thisname=.]]"></xsl:variable>
    <xsl:attribute name="name" select="$entry/attribute::node()[local-name() = $pTo]"></xsl:attribute>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The source:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<grammar>
  <element name="table" />
  <element name="chair" />
</grammar>

And the translation file (translations.xml):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<translations>
    <entry en="table" de="Tisch" fr="Table" />
    <entry en="chair" de="Stuhl" fr="Chaise"/>
</translations>

The result is:

<grammar>
   <element name="Tisch"/>
   <element name="Stuhl"/>
</grammar>

An example: when I go from ‘en’ to ‘de’ and I am at the first name attribute (‘table’) in the source file, I look into the translations file for en entry where en=”table” and select the ‘de’ attribute for the name.

Answer 1

Use keys:

<xsl:key name="en" match="translations/entry" use="@en"/>
<xsl:key name="de" match="translations/entry" use="@de"/>
<xsl:key name="fr" match="translations/entry" use="@fr"/>

and then

  <xsl:template match="@name">
    <xsl:attribute name="name" select="key($pFrom, current(), $translatations)/@*[local-name() = $pTo]"/>
  </xsl:template>

(I assume you use XSLT 2.0).