I know this is a silly question, but I can't seem to get it.

I need to find the position of an element's ancestor element, in relation to the other elements at the ancestor's level.

Example:

<ItemSet>
    <Item>
        <Question>Question 1
    <Item>
        <Question>Question 2

If I'm currently processing the second <Question> element (Question 2), I need to know the position of its parent Item in relation to the other Item elements inside ItemSet. In this case, it should evaluate to 2.

I've tried this:

<xsl:variable name="itemPos" select="ancestor::Item[position()]" />

but my debugger shows it returning a nodeset, rather than the position.

Try

count(ancestor::Item/preceding-sibling::*) + 1

You wrote:

select="ancestor::Item[position()]"

If you don't mind me saying so, that was a pretty wild guess. You're not going to get the answer to this kind of thing by trial and error.

This expression is going to return an Item, not a number; and the predicate [position()] is short for [position()=position()] which is not very useful.


Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference