Question

I’m developping a custom CQWP using a custom ContentQueryMain.xsl, I am using a list structure with which I would like to have a separator creating a new list each three items. Here is the code of the template:

<xsl:template name="CustomGroupTemplateSimple2">
    <ul>                    
        <li>
            <ul class="liste1">                             
            <xsl:variable name="Rows" select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row"/>  
            <xsl:for-each select="$Rows">
            <xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.CallPresenceStatusIconTemplate"/>            
                <li>
                    test                    
                </li>
                          <xsl:if test="position() mod 3 = 0">              
            </ul>                     
        </li>
        <li>                        
            <ul class="separator">
                          </xsl:if>                 
            </xsl:for-each>
            </ul>                   
        </li>               
    </ul>           
</xsl:template>

The separator is:

     </ul>                     
</li>                     
<li>                        
     <ul class="separator">

is responsible of the webpart error raised. The following code is working perfectly:

<xsl:template name="CustomGroupTemplateSimple2">
    <ul>                    
        <li>
            <ul class="liste1">                             
            <xsl:variable name="Rows" select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row"/>  
            <xsl:for-each select="$Rows">
            <xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.CallPresenceStatusIconTemplate"/>            
                <li>
                    test                    
                </li>
                          <xsl:if test="position() mod 3 = 0">                  
            SEPARATOR
                          </xsl:if>                 
            </xsl:for-each>
            </ul>                   
        </li>               
    </ul>           
</xsl:template>

And when I DIRECTLY replace the “SEPARATOR” with:

     </ul>                     
</li>                     
<li>                        
     <ul class="separator">

in the aspx page (after compilation), everything is perfectly working, too.

Therefore, I am really lost with this situation as I really need this separator.

Thank you very much

Answer 1

The reason for the error is obvious: Any XSLT stylesheet must be a well-formed XML document and this provided stylesheet isn’t. This is why even the XML parser that the XSLT processor uses to get its stylesheet module, raises a non-well-formedness exception.

In particular, this fragment:

        <xsl:if test="position() mod 3 = 0">
                    </ul>
                   </li>
                   <li>
             <ul class="separator">
        </xsl:if>

isnt a well-formed XML fragment, becausethere isn’t any start tag for the end tags </ul> and </li>.

Finally, here is a correct example of such positional grouping:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

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

 <xsl:template match="num[position() mod 3 = 1]">
  <group>
   <xsl:copy-of select=
    ". | following-sibling::*[not(position() > 2)]"/>
  </group>
 </xsl:template>

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

when this transformation is applied to the following XML document:

<nums>
  <num>01</num>
  <num>02</num>
  <num>03</num>
  <num>04</num>
  <num>05</num>
  <num>06</num>
  <num>07</num>
  <num>08</num>
  <num>09</num>
  <num>10</num>
</nums>

the wanted, correctly grouped result is produced:

<nums>
   <group>
      <num>01</num>
      <num>02</num>
      <num>03</num>
   </group>
   <group>
      <num>04</num>
      <num>05</num>
      <num>06</num>
   </group>
   <group>
      <num>07</num>
      <num>08</num>
      <num>09</num>
   </group>
   <group>
      <num>10</num>
   </group>
</nums>