however my select=".." for pulling the values is
 pulling null values.  What am I missing?


select="/doc/plans/plan/descriptor[descriptor/@descriptor_name =
                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

that will select discriptor elements which have a descriptor child which
has a descriptor_name attribute

I suspect your descriptor elements are not nested and you meant

select="/doc/plans/plan/descriptor[@descriptor_name =

Incidentally once you get it working, you can probably optimise it using
keys. Optimising the idiom

/some/where/in/the/doc/element[@attribute='something']

is exactly what keys are there to optimise. But get ot working firts,
speed it up later.

David

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