Question

The problem I’m trying to solve is to get all elements that contain only a unique text element but at the same time also being able to exclude node trees based on a element name passed as a parameter to the XSLT sheet.

The part to select all the nodes containing only a unique text element that’s not empty was relatively easy:

$StartNode//element()/text()[normalize-space(.)]/parent::*

where $StartNode is a Xpath Expression to a specific Element in the XML document.

Now the part I had quite some some problems with, excluding an specific node tree from the results:

so I was hoping for something like:

$StartNode//element()/text()[normalize-space(.)]/parent::*[not(ancestor::**$element_to_be_excluded**)]

where $element_to_be_excluded is the element name to exclude.

But it’s not possible to use a variable on that part of the expression…

So I came up with this solution

<xsl:variable name="ancestors_of_current_node" as="xs:string*">
   <xsl:sequence select="$current_parent_node/ancestor::*/name()"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="is_value_in_sequence" as="xs:boolean" select="functx:is-value-in-sequence($exclude_node_local_name, $ancestors_of_current_node)"/>
<xsl:if test="not($is_value_in_sequence)">
    <xsl:call-template name="dataElementMap">
       <xsl:with-param name="node_item" select="$current_parent_node"/>
    </xsl:call-template>
</xsl:if>

where functx:is-value-in-sequence is:

<xsl:function name="functx:is-value-in-sequence" as="xs:boolean" xmlns:functx="http://www.functx.com">
  <xsl:param name="value" as="xs:anyAtomicType?"/>
  <xsl:param name="seq" as="xs:anyAtomicType*"/>
  <xsl:sequence select="$value = $seq"/>
</xsl:function>

Now the question is, it’s there a more elegant way to solve this problem?

Thanks in advance for any hint.

Regards
Vlax

Answer 1

Instead of doing (which doesn’t work due to the variable, as you mention)

$StartNode//element()/text()[normalize-space(.)]
   /parent::*[not(ancestor::$element_to_be_excluded)]

Could you try this instead, to check the ancestor’s name?

$StartNode//element()/text()[normalize-space(.)]
   /parent::*[not(ancestor::*[local-name() = $element_to_be_excluded])]