newbie: XSL question.

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August 16th, 2004, 11:27 AM

Ru_

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newbie: XSL question.

Hi board,

If any of y'all w/ the know how on this can respond I'd be grateful.

Ok my question is this.. I'm only playing around with XML and XSL primarily for XSLT transformations on a large publishing industry site.

So I have my XML file, a dump of for example a bunch of Sport stories from a newspaper (very short listing):

PHP Code:


		
			
<category_listing name="Sport">

<category name="Soccer">

<story>

<rank>1</rank>

<byline>Author here X</byline>

<headline>Big name transfer to UK Club</headline>

<summary>Soccer story summary here</summary>

</story>

<story>

<rank>2</rank>

<byline>Author here X</byline>

<headline>The second ranked story</headline>

<summary>Soccer story summary here</summary>

</story>

<story>

<rank>3</rank>

<byline>Author here X</byline>

<headline>The third ranked story</headline>

<summary>Soccer story summary here</summary>

</story>

</category>

<category name="Baseball">

<story>

<rank>1</rank>

<byline>Author here X</byline>

<headline>Baseball legend does something</headline>

<summary>Baseballstory summary here</summary>

</story>

<story>

<rank>2</rank>

<byline>Author here X</byline>

<headline>The second ranked story</headline>

<summary>Baseball story summary here</summary>

</story>

<story>

<rank>3</rank>

<byline>Author here X</byline>

<headline>The third ranked story</headline>

<summary>Baseball story summary here</summary>

</story>

</category>

</category_listing>

Ok so that's a brief example of the XML.

So using XSL I can successfully transform this into well formatted html with category names in bold followed by the ranked stories etc.

I can also take for example a rank='1' story and display it anywhere. However, this is where I'm stuck and unsure as to whether this is possible with XSL.

Can I use XSL to extract (dont take me literally) the rank=1 stories and display them before the other categories as 'Top Stories' (which I have done) but then when my XSL works on outputting the individual Categories it omits headlines that appeared in the 'Top Stories' ie html would be like this.

TOP STORIES
- Big name transfer to UK Club
- Baseball legend does something

SOCCER
- The second ranked story
- The third ranked story

BASEBALL
- The second ranked story
- The third ranked story

Also, can I apply any sort of 'counter' to this process whereby I would only use 4 rank 1 stories and then for the rest rank 1's appear under their associated category... ?

Ok so hopefully you get what I'm trying to do. I don't expect you to write my code but if anyone can indicate if this is possible and indicate how I might do it that would be great.

Cheers
R

August 16th, 2004, 11:46 AM

khwang

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This is definitely feasible. Basically you want a conditional statement, if rank=1 then... else...

Check out this tutorial:

http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/xsl_choose.asp

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August 16th, 2004, 11:53 AM

Ru_

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Quote:

Originally Posted by khwang

This is definitely feasible. Basically you want a conditional statement, if rank=1 then... else...

Check out this tutorial:

http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/xsl_choose.asp

Thanks khwang,

Yes I'm familiar with the choose and have used it in this sucessfully to get those story[rank='1'] which I want.

However, for example if Sport has 8 categories I will only want to take four rank 1 stories for my 'Top Stories' section in the HTML.

Also if the rank 1 story appeared in Top Stories I do not want to duplicate it under its individual category listing as in the html output ex. above....?

August 16th, 2004, 03:22 PM

NotGoddess

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Ru_

Sport has 8 categories I will only want to take four rank 1 stories for my 'Top Stories' section in the HTML.

You can use a selective position() trick for this:

PHP Code:


		
			
<xsl:template name="showTopStories" match="/">

<xsl:param name="count" />



<xsl:for-each select="//story[rank=1]">

   <xsl:if test="(position() <= $count)">

      <p style="text-weight:bold;color:green"><xsl:value-of select="headline" /></p>

   </xsl:if>

</xsl:for-each>



</xsl:template>



<xsl:template match="/">



   <xsl:call-template name="showTopStories">

      <xsl:with-param name="count">4</xsl:with-param>

   </xsl:call-template>



[...print other stories ]

</xsl:template>

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ru_

Also if the rank 1 story appeared in Top Stories I do not want to duplicate it under its individual category listing as in the html output ex. above....?

This I could not work out cleanly, but you might want to look into using call-template and with-param, doing a recursive call to increment the param.

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