Question

I’ve been wrestling with the correct syntax for this and it boils down to:

How do I test to see if the parent node’s attribute has a certain value?

I’m transforming some XHTML. I template match a <tr> in order to reformat the colspan attributes of some of the cells in that row. To add further confidence that this will only occur in certain tables, I need to check that the <table> the <tr> belongs to has a particular id attribute value.

<xsl:template match="tr">
<tr>
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="(count(td[@colspan='2'])=2 and count(td)=3)">
        <td colspan="1">
          <xsl:copy-of select="td[1]/node()" />
        </td>
        <td colspan="4">
          <xsl:copy-of select="td[2]/node()" />
        </td>
    </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:copy-of select="@*|node()" />
      </xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
</tr>
</xsl:template>

Here is the code I have so far. I either need to add further “ands” to my when test or another xsl:if or xsl:when to check the table attribute. For this instance, lets have the table id=”Transformable”.

To clarify, i only wish to do the above transformation when the table that the <tr> belongs to has an id of “Transformable”.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I guess you can use parent axis in your template match definition.

<xsl:template match="tr[parent::table/@id = 'Transformable']">
  This template matches only 'tr' within a 'table' with 'id' attribute which equals 'Transformable'.
</xsl:template>

Update: For complex nesting (if table is not a direct parent of tr) – you can use ancestor axis.

<xsl:template match="tr[ancestor::table/@id = 'Transformable']">
  This template matches only 'tr' within a 'table' with 'id' attribute which equals 'Transformable'.
</xsl:template>