Hi,

  Just wanted to know if its possible to break from a for-each loop. Pls refer to the following sample : For e.g. I've a xml like this.

<catalog>
  <cd>
     <title>Empire Burlesque</title>
     <artist>Bob Dylan</artist>
     <price>10</price>
  </cd>
  <cd>
     <title>Hide your heart</title>
     <artist>Bonnie Tyler</artist>
     <price>20</price>
  </cd>
  <cd>
     <title>Greatest Hits</title>
     <artist>Dolly Parton</artist>
     <price>30</price>
  </cd>
  <cd>
     <title>Billborad Hits</title>
     <artist>John Denver</artist>
     <price>50</price>
  </cd>
</catalog>

I've the following xsl,

<xsl:for-each select="catalog/cd">
      <xsl:if test="price > 10">
        <tr>
          <td><xsl:value-of select="title"/></td>
          <td><xsl:value-of select="artist"/></td>
        </tr>
      </xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>

This will iterate for cd element even if the price match happens at the very first occurence. I want to stop the iteration once the match happens. In my case,the xml data I'm working on holds big amount of data. My if condition matched a primary key which will only have a single occurence in the entire xml. So all I need is
<cd>
     <title>Empire Burlesque</title>
     <artist>Bob Dylan</artist>
     <price>10</price>
  </cd>

Is it possible to avoid the unnecessary iterations,which might prove a performance issue for a big xml ?

Any help will be much appreciated.

Thanks

You can't break out of a for-each loop for the simple reason that it isn't a loop. XSLT is not a procedural language.
Try to imagine that when you do a for-each all elements that are selected are processed simultaneously, in parallel so as to speak.
You can accomplish what you want by narrowing down the selection to start with: Remeber you asked for price greater than 10 so "Empire Burlesque" won't appear as its price is not greater than 10.


--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

You can't break out of a for-each loop, because it is not actually a loop: it is a mapping expression, which processes each item in the input sequence separately, in an arbitrary order, perhaps even in parallel. If you want to process a sequence and stop when a certain condition is reached, you need to use a recursive template that steps through the sequence one item at a time.

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

What if there is more that has a price > 10?

Well, I don't know what you want to do in that case. I was only trying to guess your requirements from the patchy statement you made and the code you supplied which we know doesn't do what you want.

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

I'm confident doing a recursive template will work, I just haven't been able to figure it out yet. Thank you.