Hi.

I'm new to XML and I'm having a problem filtering the data from a central XML file. I have a website that catalogues history-related web resources and categorises them by period, and I've created an xml file to hold this data. My website's navigation is based on the period categories of the web resources I've catalogued (Roman, Medieval, etc). I need a way to filter the data from the central xml file based on the link the user follows - so if they click on the 'Roman' menu option, only the records that have 'Roman' as their <period> element are returned in the resulting page.

At present, the central xml file links to an xsl file for formatting, but I can only filter one thing at a time via this. Is there a way of linking several xsl files - each filtering a different period category depending on the user's navigation choice - that can be applied to the central xml file independantly? Sort of like:

Menu Option 1 - catalogue.xml + roman.xsl
Menu Option 2 - catalogue.xml + medieval.xsl

I'm trying to be as cross-browser friendly as possible. I can only think of the following solutions (but don't really know how to go about any of them!!)

1. Pass a variable via the menu option url that can be used to specify the xsl styles to be used.

2. Somehow link the central xml document's content to xml sub-documents - each of which link to a different xsl stylesheet.

Apologies if this topic has been discussed before - I've had a good search but can't really find anything that helps me! Any help much appreciated!

Thanks,

Pat

You don't want to select the stylesheet to be applied in a link from the source document, you want to select it from script on your HTML page. For a cross-browser API for invoking XSLT transformations, see Sarissa on Sourceforge.

Rather than using different XSLT stylesheets, you probably want to invoke the same XSLT stylesheet with a parameter.

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