Inserting a heading only in only the first element

stekker · September 22nd, 2006, 06:39 AM

I would like to insert a heading for the first child element in another element, and not for any others that may follow. For example, if I have XML like this:
--------------------------------------

<article>
    <section>
        <information>
        some stuff
        </information>

        <question>
        one
        </question>

        <question>
           two
        </question>

    </section>

    <section>
        <information>
        some stuff
        </information>

        <question>
        three
        </question>

        <question>
            four
        </question>

    </section>

</article>
-----------------------------------

And my XSLT looks something like this:

------------------------------------

    <xsl:template match="/">
    <html>
        <head>
            <title></title>

        </head>
        <body>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>

        </body>
    </html>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="information">
<b><xsl:apply-templates/></b>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="question">
<h3>Test My Knowledge</h3>
<h4>Question <xsl:number level="any"/></h4>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>
------------------------------------

Then I get the following result:

------------------------------------

some stuff
Test My Knowledge
Question 1
Test My Knowledge
Question 2
some stuff
Test My Knowledge
Question 3
Test My Knowledge
Question 4
--------------------------------------

But I would like the "Test my Knowledge" to apeear only in front of the first "question" element in every "section" element, something like this:

----------------------------------------

some stuff
Test My Knowledge
Question 1
Question 2

some stuff
Test My Knowledge
Question 3
Question 4

---------------------------------------

Is it possible to do this without changing the structure of the XML?

mhkay · September 22nd, 2006, 07:04 AM

Since you want the heading output once for each information element, just change your code to produce it as part of the template that processes information elements.

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

asearle · September 28th, 2006, 08:06 AM

Hi Stekker,

I used this syntax to pick out the first entry ...

<xsl:apply-templates select="/dataroot/xmlout[1]/REPTITLE" />

REPTITLE is a field containing the title of the report and [1] tells the processor to take just the first occurance (I believe).

Hope this helps you :-)

Cheers,
Alan.