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Hi Don,
I'm no db guy, but it seems to me that David's on when he suggests that XML output would be more useful, and just as easy, as CSV, at least if you were having to run a parser over the stuff again. It's true that you face an XML design question at that point, which seems like an extra step. But from another point of view, the question of the design of the output has always been there, just not on the surface. Assuming that unless there's a reason you want it another way, the design of the output might simply reflect the design of the input, your default might well be to base your stylesheets on the identity transform. It's not hard to take the recursive one-node-at-a-time identity transform (it's given in the XSLT Rec, 7.5), and add a template with a select expression (and maybe a sort instruction) for your query. That makes a two-template stylesheet to change between applications. That is, it may be a feature, not a bug, that there isn't a single way or even a "best" way: but there are still ways that are pretty easy. Heck, here's an example, two templates that select out all the 'reader' elements from arbitrary input XML, sorted alphabetically by their 'username' attributes: <xsl:template match="@*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template><xsl:template match="/">
<result>
<xsl:apply-templates select="//reader">
<xsl:sort select="@username">
</xsl:apply-templates>
</result>
</xsl:template>It's pretty easy to spin off that; and the model is easy to extend if you want to suppress stuff, further rearrange, etc. Regards, Wendell At 12:11 PM 1/19/01 -0500, you wrote: The XSL-ness of the question is in the output of the transformation - I want to use XSLT to filter/sort my XML data. It's not really an XML question per se. I would like to have a "neat" way of always transforming into some format of data, like SQL gives you when it produces a resultset for you.
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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