Question

There must be a generic way to transform some hierachical XML such as:

<element1 A='AValue' B='BValue'>    <element2 C='DValue' D='CValue'>       <element3 E='EValue1' F='FValue1'/>       <element3 E='EValue2' F='FValue2'/>    </element2>    ... </element1> 

into the flattened XML (html) picking up selected attributes along the way and providing different labels for the attributes that become column headers.

<table>    <tr>      <th>A_Label</th>      <th>D_Label</th>      <th>E_Label</th>      <th>F_Label</th>    </tr>    <tr>      <td>AValue</td>      <td>DValue</td>      <td>EValue1</td>      <td>FValue1</td>    </tr>    <tr>      <td>AValue</td>      <td>DValue</td>      <td>EValue2</td>      <td>FValue2</td>    </tr> <table> 

OK, so there’s not generic solution due to the attribute re-labelling but you get what I mean hopefully. I’ve just started on all the XSLT/XPATH stuff so I’ll work it out in good time but any clues would be useful.

Answer 1

I’m not 100% sure of what you are trying to do but this solution may work if your element1, element2 and element3 are nested consistently.

<xsl:stylesheet version='1.0' xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'     xmlns:msxsl='urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt' exclude-result-prefixes='msxsl'>     <xsl:output method='xml' indent='yes'/>      <xsl:template match='/'>         <table>             <xsl:apply-templates select='//element3'></xsl:apply-templates>         </table>     </xsl:template>      <xsl:template match='element3'>         <tr>             <td><xsl:value-of select='../../@A'/></td>             <td><xsl:value-of select='../../@B'/></td>             <td><xsl:value-of select='../@C'/></td>             <td><xsl:value-of select='../@D'/></td>             <td><xsl:value-of select='@E'/></td>             <td><xsl:value-of select='@F'/></td>         </tr>         <xsl:apply-templates select='*'></xsl:apply-templates>     </xsl:template>  </xsl:stylesheet>