It's much easier than you think.

item[document(@ref)/*/@specific-attribute = $certain-value]/@ref

will create the required set of @ref attribute nodes, assuming that's
what you really want.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of 
> Shea, Michael
> Sent: 05 February 2003 03:46
> To: 'XSL-List@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
> Subject:  creating a node-set at run-time
> 
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> We have this xml as our input document:
> 
> <list>
>     <item ref="item1.xml"/>
>     <item ref="item2.xml"/>
>     <item ref="item3.xml"/>
>     <item ref="item4.xml"/>
> </list>
> 
> We want to go through each of the item elements and using 
> the document function, load each item?.xml file and check 
> a specific attribute in the root node of that loaded document 
> to see if it matches a certain value. If it does match we want 
> to add the value of the ref attribute to a node-set.  We want 
> to have a variable to which this node-set is assigned, so we 
> can do some processing on it at a later time (we want to run 
> a diff on it against another node-set amongst other things).
> 
> Basically this is like storing items into a variable (eg
> var = var + new_item), but as we know, you can't reassign values 
> to a variable.  
> 
> So can this be done using XSLT?  I was trying to come up with a 
> recursive algorithm to do this, but am not sure how.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Mike.
> 
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> 


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