Obtaining the Current Node for the Current XSLT Template

In a stylesheet, the current node is the node for which the XSLT processor instantiates a template. When the XPath processor evaluates an expression during stylesheet processing, the initial context node for the expression is set to the current node for the stylesheet instruction that contains the expression. Because the context node can change during evaluation of subexpressions, it is useful to be able to retrieve, from within a subexpression, the original context node for which the expression is being evaluated. You can use the current() function for this purpose. The format is

node-set current() 

For example, the following stylesheet causes the XSLT processor to pass the bookstore node to the outer xsl:for-each instruction:

<xsl:stylesheet 
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/XSL/Transform" version="1.0" >
<xsl:template match="/"> 
<xsl:for-each select="bookstore"> 
<xsl:for-each select=
"book[@style=current()/@specialty]"> 
... 
</xsl:for-each> 
</xsl:for-each> 
</xsl:template> 

</xsl:stylesheet>

The current() function in the inner expression returns the bookstore element because the bookstore element is the current node for the inner xsl:for-each instruction. The result of the query contains book elements if the value of their style attribute is the same as the value of the specialty attribute of the bookstore element (novel).

Suppose the select attribute in the inner xsl:for-each instruction specified the dot (.) instead of the current() function:

<xsl:for-each select="book[@style=./@specialty]">

You can nest xsl:for-each instructions more than one level deep. In any given nested xsl:for-each instruction, the current() function returns the current node for the closest enclosing xsl:for-each instruction.