Question

I know there are similar, more complex posts around, but I just can’t get this simple thing to work. I have a very very simple XSLT loop, which I just need to run 5 times over. That’s it.

Here’s what I have:

<xsl:template match="/">
  <div id="container">
    <xsl:for-each select="$currentPage/myItems/data/item">
      <img src="image.gif" />
    </xsl:for-each>
  </div>
</xsl:template>

This works fine, I just need to loop this part:

    <xsl:for-each select="$currentPage/myItems/data/item">
      <img src="image.gif" />
    </xsl:for-each>

five times over, so that the output is literally just repeated 5 times. I don’t want to just copy and paste it five times (although that does work) as there’s got to be a better way to handle it.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on this? Thanks!

Answer 1

The only imperative looping construct in XSLT is for-each but that loops over nodes in the input document. If you don’t want to implement using recursion, put the inside of the loop in a named template and then use call-template five times to call it.

Something like:

<xsl:template name='inside-loop'>
  <xsl:for-each select="$currentPage/myItems/data/item">
    <img src="image.gif" />
  </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

and then where you want to call this:

<xsl:call-template name='inside-loop' />