Question

This is going to be a really simple question I’m sure. I have an xml document that I’m transforming via XSL. The important part of this xml looks like this:

<root xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Transaction>
    <EnrollmentModel>
      <FutureContributionsModel>
        <FutureContributionsElectionType>ACertainThirdParty</FutureContributionsElectionType>
      </FutureContributionsModel>
    </EnrollmentModel>
  <Transaction>
</root>

And I want to add the following if the value of <FutureContributionsElectionType> does, in fact, equal ACertainThirdParty:

<fo:table-row>
    <fo:table-cell>
        <fo:block font-family="verdanaPS" font-size="9" padding-bottom="15px" padding-top="10px">
                        The Participant has successfully opted in to use ACertainThirdParty as the managed provider for the account.
        </fo:block>
    </fo:table-cell>
</fo:table-row>

Note that there is only one third party, so I don’t need to get the value of the node for the custom text, I can just hard-code it in there.

If the value of <FutureContributionsElectionType> does NOT equal ACertainThirdParty, I wan’t to add a whole bunch of other stuff.

Here’s what I tried:

So this seems like a job for <xsl:choose> and <xsl:when> / <xsl:otherwise>, right?
Here’s what I got:

<xsl:choose>
  <xsl:when test="FutureContributionsModel/FutureContributionsElectionType='ACertainThirdParty'">
    <fo:table-row>
      <fo:table-cell>
        <fo:block font-family="verdanaPS" font-size="9" padding-bottom="15px" padding-top="10px">
                        The Participant has successfully opted in to use ACertainThirdParty as the managed provider for the account.
        </fo:block>
      </fo:table-cell>
    </fo:table-row>
  </xsl:when>
  <xsl:otherwise>
    <fo:table-row>
      <fo:table-cell>
          ...
          Lots of stuff
          ...
      </fo:table-cell>
    </fo:table-row>
  </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

But when I transform it, the otherwise code gets hit rather than the correct code (in my xml the value is indeed ACertainThirdParty. My guess is my problem is that I don’t know XPath, so I’m probably assuming I can do things that I can’t. What’s going on here?

Answer 1

Most probably the context (current node) isn’t Transaction.

You can use an absolute XPath expression:

/*/Transaction/EnrollmentModel/FutureContributionsModel/FutureContributionsElectionType='ACertainThirdParty'

Much better, avoid using explicit conditionals — use templates and template match patterns:

<xsl:template match="FutureContributionsElectionType[.='ACertainThirdParty']">

  <!-- Specific Processing Here  -->
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="FutureContributionsElectionType[not(.='ACertainThirdParty')]">

  <!-- Other Specific Processing Here  -->
</xsl:template>