sorting nested elements again

stekker · June 3rd, 2006, 05:45 AM

I am trying to find a way to sort the contents of an XML document not just by element ("section" in my example), but to also sort the elements in each of those elements ("para" in my example). The result should not seperate the "para" elements from their parent "section" elements when displayed.

My XML document looks like this:

<notes>
    <section sensing="2" intuitive="3">
        <title>Section One

    </title>
        <extra show="on">extra one
        </extra>

        <para sensing="1" intuitive="3">One para

    </para>
        <para sensing="3" intuitive="1">Two para

    </para>
    </section>
    <section sensing="1" intuitive="2">
        <title>Section two

    </title>
        <para sensing="1" intuitive="3">Three para

    </para>
        <para sensing="3" intuitive="1">Four para

    </para>
        <extra show="on">
        extra two
        </extra>

    </section>
    <section sensing="3" intuitive="1">
        <title>Section three

    </title>
        <para sensing="1" intuitive="3">Five para

    </para>
        <para sensing="3" intuitive="1">Six para

    </para>
        <extra show="on">
        extra three
        </extra>

    </section>
</notes>

The stylesheet that sorts this only by the "section" elements looks like this:

<xsl:template match="/">

<html>
    <head>
        <title></title>
    </head>
    <body>

<xsl:apply-templates/>

    </body>
</html>

</xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="notes">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="section">
    <xsl:sort select="@sensing" />
        </xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:include href="notesx.xslt"/>

</xsl:stylesheet>

The "notesx" stylesheet looks like this:

<xsl:template match="section">
<h3><xsl:apply-templates select="title"/></h3>
<xsl:for-each select="para">
<p><xsl:value-of select="text()"/></p>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Why does the following stylesheet not work?

<xsl:template match="/">

<html>
    <head>
        <title></title>
    </head>
    <body>

<xsl:apply-templates/>

    </body>
</html>

</xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="notes">

       <xsl:for-each select="section">
      <xsl:sort select="@intuitive"/>

             <xsl:for-each select="para">
                    <xsl:sort select="@intuitive" />

                </xsl:for-each>

        </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:include href="notesx.xslt"/>

</xsl:stylesheet>

mhkay · June 5th, 2006, 03:38 AM

You code doesn;t actually generate any output within the nested for-each loops. Perhaps you took it out for clarity; but in that case you could have taken a lot of other things out for clarity as well, and you are asking us to debug code which is not the code you actually ran. If you are still having difficulty getting this to work please submit a complete example that's simplified as much as you can, showing the input, the stylesheet, the expected output and the actual output.

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