Question

I’m very new to XML and XSLT. I have a homework assignment that asks us to generate a page based on some XML data. It’s pretty straightforward, so here it goes:

My XML data looks like this:

<convention>
    <title>ABC Web Development Conference</title>
    <location>ABC College, San Diego, CA</location>
    <date> March 25, 2011 - March 27, 2011</date>
    <exhibitor>
        <name>John Smith</name>
        <address1>1234 2nd Avenue</address1>
        <address2></address2>
        <city>San Diego</city>
        <state>CA</state>
        <email>[e-mail]</email>
        <specialization>
            <subject>Web Development</subject>
            <subject>Software Design</subject>
        </specialization>
    </exhibitor>
        <exhibitor>
        <name>Jane Smith</name>
        <address1>1234 First Avenue</address1>
        <address2>Ste 123</address2>
        <city>San Diego</city>
        <state>CA</state>
        <email>[e-mail]</email>
        <specialization>
            <subject>Web Development</subject>
        </specialization>
    </exhibitor>
</convention>

Basically, I’ve set it up to output into a table nicely. My problem comes up when I output address 2. I want to make it so that if the string-length of address2 is greater then 0, output a comma.

Here is what my XSL data looks like:

<table width="600" border="1" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="5">
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3" align="center"><xsl:value-of select="convention/title"/></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3" align="center"><xsl:value-of select="convention/location"/></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3" align="center"><xsl:value-of select="convention/date"/></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>Exhibitor</th>
    <th>Address</th>
    <th>Specialization</th>
  </tr>
    <xsl:for-each select="convention/exhibitor">
    <tr>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="name"/><br /><xsl:value-of select="email"/></td>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="address1"/>, <xsl:value-of select="address2"/>&nbsp;<xsl:value-of select="city"/>, <xsl:value-of select="state"/></td>
      <td><xsl:for-each select="specialization/subject"><xsl:value-of select="."/><br /></xsl:for-each></td>
    </tr>
    </xsl:for-each>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3">Total Number of Exhibitors: <xsl:value-of select="count(convention/exhibitor)"/></td>
  </tr>
</table>

Any assistance is greatly appreciated 🙂

Answer 1

Do you have a course book? I will give you some hints that may help you in locating the information you need:

• XSL supports conditional statements (hint: xsl:if)
• With a specific XPath function, you can check a length of a string (hint: http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_functions.asp)

If you are unfamiliar with these concepts, I suggest you to look more information from your course material.

Good luck!