I would recommend that you go through one of the many tutorials
available on the web, and perhaps buy a good book. It seems as though
you are grasping at straws with no real foundational understanding of
either XPath or XSLT. I don't say this to be rude, or mean, and I hope
you don't take it that way. It will save you a lot of time and
headaches in the future if you first read a bit about the language
before trying to plunge forward.

Try this search:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=xsl+tutorial

Once you have a basic grasp of xpath and xsl then this problem will
not seem so difficult.

Here is an XPath expression that does what you want: "../item[alt=$number]"

Good Luck,
Josh

On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 23:57:38 +0200, Wim Lemkens <wim.lemkens@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sunday 11 July 2004 16:06, Wim Lemkens wrote:
> I have cut the problem down to this:
> I have
> <usecase>
>  <item>
>    <alt>1</alt>
>  </item>
>  <item>
>  </item>
>  <item>
>    <alt>2</alt>
>  </item>
>  <itemcontainer>
>  </itemcontainer>
> </usecase>
> 
> And I want to select the "item" containing an "alt" with a given number. The
> location where I want to use the info is in "itemcontainer".
> 
> I tought of something like this:
> ancestor::usecase/*/alt[@number = $number]
> where the $number is the number I want to select.
> But the value of the number in the alt is not really a attribute. I tried to
> put it as an attribute
> <xsl:attribute name="number">
>  <xsl:apply-templates/>
> </xsl:attribute>
> That didn't work.
> 
> How should I do it?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Wim Lemkens