> order="{$orderby}"/>

order is not an Attribute Value Template so you can not do that.
An early lotusxsl did I think have a bug that treated order as an AVT
but current xalan meets the spec in this regard.

you have to use
<xsl:choose>
 <xsl:when test="$orderby='ascending'"><xsl:sort select=... order="ascending"/></xsl:when>

(I don't think there is any good reason for order not being an AVT, it
just isnt)

David


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