I thought about that (and this is the way I implemented it today), but I am
not entirely satisfied with this solution as nothing prevents the fact that
a A/@name is a substring of another A/@name attribute. In those cases (may
be rare, but possible), I can get erroneous result.
Thanks for the tip anyway.

Thomas

-----Original Message-----
From: Stuart Brown [mailto:sbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 11:11 AM
To: 'xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: RE:  XSLT/XPath help to resolve definition references in a W
SDL XML fi le


Hi Thomas,

> Let's say that I have an XML document looking like that:
> 
> <root>
>   <A name="a1"><B .../></A>
>   <A name="a2"><B .../></A>
>   <A name="a3"><B .../></A>
>   <C aRef="ns1:a1"/>
>   <C aRef="ns2:a2"/>
> </root>
> 
> I want to be able to select all the B element which are under
> the A elements
> referenced by the C element (the A elements for which a 
> C/@aRef attribute
> value, minus the prefix, is equal to the A/@name attribute).

I'd bundle up all the @aRef attributes space separated into a global
variable, and then use a predicate to only select those A elements whose
name attribute is contained in the variable string.

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="1.0">

 <xsl:variable name="allCs">
   <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
   <xsl:for-each select="/root/C">
     <xsl:value-of select="concat(substring-after(@aRef,':'),' ')"/>
   </xsl:for-each>
 </xsl:variable>

 <xsl:template match="A[contains($allCs,concat(' ',@name,' '))]">
   <xsl:copy-of select="B"/>
 </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

This uses string-handling, so there's probably a faster way, particularly if
your file is large.

Cheers,

Stuart

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