Note that you said

> Get first preceding-sibling of current node that has the ss:Index attrib
                                              ^^^^^^^^^
not

Get first preceding-sibling of of the ss:Index attrib of the current node that has the 
                                                      ^^^^

Th Xpath spelling of "that has" is "[  ]"

so not

preceding-sibling::node()/@ss:Index/preceding-sibling::node()

which counts all the preceding-sblings of the ss:Index attribute, but
attributes don't have siblings.

you want

preceding-sibling::node()[@ss:Index][1]/preceding-sibling::node()

David

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