Question

I’m working on some xslt transformations and I’ve just found out that there might or might not be an extra node between my current parent and it’s clildren, depending on external factors. So now I have to change my xslt code in order to deal with both of these scenarios:

scenario 1:

<parent>
   <child/>
   <child/>
<parent>

scenario 2:

<parent>
   <nuisance>
      <child/>
      <child/>
   </nuisance>
<parent>

I have situations in which I test="parent/child" or otherwise use this format of accessing a parent/node.

I need something like test="parent/magic(* or none)/child"

They only way I know of that can solve this problem is to use:

<xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="parent/child">
       <!-- select="parent/child"-->            
    </xsl:when>

    <xsl:otherwise>
       <!-- select="parent/*/child"-->      
    </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

But this will triple my code in size and will be a lot of manual labour…

Help much appreciated!

Answer 1

Why not simply select the union of the two?

<xsl:apply-templates select="parent/child|parent/*/child"/>

This will select the correct nodes in both cases.