i have the following xsl commands:

<xsl:variable name="field" select="."/>
<output:sort select="($field)" data-type="number"/>

so what i'm trying to do is to output another XSL command through the use of a namespace-alias. but my problem is that, i wanted the select="($field)" part to be dynamic and not to output it literally. is this possible??

thanks.

Perhaps you want select="{$field}".

But you haven't made yourself clear, what exactly do you want the output to be?

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

thanks for the reply. that just solved my problem.

i didn't know about the curly braces, so thanks for the info.

just a follow-up question,

why is it that when i use namespace-alias, it doesn't output the correct namespace specified.

example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http...Transform"
   xmlns:abc="abc">
<xsl:namespace-alias stylesheet-prefix="sgn" result-prefix="xsl"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
   <abc:stylesheet version="1.0">
      <abc:template match="/">
   </abc:stylesheet>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

of course i'm expecting that the output xsl would have a namespace of "xsl", but instead it totally changes all namespaces to "abc" like these:

<abc:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http...Transform">
   <abc:template match="/">
</abc:stylesheet>

btw, i'm using the java Transformer class.
what went wrong?

thanks.

If your output is really as specified then it's wrong: the "abc" prefix shouldn't appear unless there is an xmlns:abc="..." namespace declaration. If the "abc" prefix is bound to the XSLT namespace URI, then all is well (prefixes aren't important, only URIs).

Transformer isn't a class, it's an interface. There are several products that implement this interface. What's significant is the implementation you are using. You can discover this by using <xsl:value-of select="system-property('xsl:vendor-url')"/>

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