Question

I need to write a clause into my xslt that says if an element is present display text node and if it is not present, display nothing. I can find how to write if the text node is a particular word but not if the element is present.

Any advice is much appreciated.

PS: new to xslt/xml etc

Eg: XML represents a book containing pages. One version of the page has a header. Underneath is a table with four columns and 20 rows. Under this is a footer. This footer is not on the other version of the page. My xslt needs to transform the xml into a webpage representing this visually.

the xml therefore has an element of <Footer> which has a minOccurs of 0 in the schema.

Answer 1

This can be done by omitting the comparison e.g.

<xsl:if test='root/element'>

However, a cleaner way ultimately getting what you want is to use xsl:templates

So for xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
  <page>
    <title>Franks</title>
    <header>header text</header>
    <bodytext>here is the body text</bodytext>
  </page>
  <page>
    <title>Joes</title>
    <footer>footer text</footer>
    <bodytext>here is the body text2</bodytext>
  </page>
</root>

The xsl

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl"
>
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">

      <xsl:apply-templates select="page"></xsl:apply-templates>
    </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="page">
    <h1>
      <xsl:value-of select="title"/>
    </h1>
    <p>
      <xsl:value-of select="bodytext"/>
    </p>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="footer"/>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="footer">
    <p>
      <xsl:value-of select="."/>
    </p>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

illustrates the way this can be done.
check out w3schools xpath tutorial for more information on selecting.