Related to my previous post (http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=40752), I have a document filled with elements that I'm turning into an HTML form. I have:

1. An XML document describing each of the form fields that should appear on the page (these are dynamic based on what the user is doing, so I don't know the names of the elements).
2. A block I'm adding to the XML at run-time that provides existing content to populate the form elements with.
3. As an additional point of confusion, there can be more than one piece of content in #2; in these cases, I want to show one copy of the relevant form element from #1 for each piece of content.

XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<page>
  <fields>
    <noneditable>
      <language></language>
    </noneditable>
    <editable>
      <screens>
        <meta>
          <keywords formelement="textarea" maxlength="255"></keywords>
          <description formelement="textarea" maxlength="255"></description>
          <solution formelement="select"></solution>
          <sector formelement="select"></sector>
          <expertise formelement="select"></expertise>
        </meta>
        <front>
          <title formelement="text" validation="notempty" errormessage="Please provide a title" sortable="alpha" maxlength="255"></title>
          <strapline formelement="text" maxlength="255"></strapline>
          <headerimage formelement="library" library="headerimages"></headerimage>
          <tagline formelement="library" library="taglines"></tagline>
          <maincontent formelement="richtext" allowmultiple="true" maincontent="true"></maincontent>
          <focusareas formelement="noidea" allowmultiple="true"></focusareas>
        </front>
      </screens>
    </editable>
  </fields>
</page>

I'm inserting a block in <page> called <contents>. For every item that has content, I'm inserting a child into <contents> named the same as the tag inside screens (e.g., /page/contents/maincontent) and then inserting each piece of content as an <item> child of that block.

What I've read suggests there's no dynamic XPath in XSLT 1.0. Given that, is there some way for me to get at the proper contents during a transformation?

Apologies for the confusing mess of a question. Let me know how best to clarify.

Given I'm working in C#, http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...etFunction.asp looks promising.

I don't think you need dynamic XPath to do this. The only things that are variable (or data-driven) are element names, and you can handle dynamic element names easily in XPath (and XSLT), using constructs such as select="*[name()=$param]" and <xsl:element name="{$param]"/>. You would only need dynamic XPath if you didn't know until run-time what operators to use, e.g. whether to do "+" or "-", or "and" or "or".

(Having said that, there are plenty of applications that make effective use of extensions like saxon:evaluate() that provide dynamic XPath evaluation)

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