Dear All,

I currently have an XSLT template which displays a variety of selectable lists which are used to filter the data in the main form. These work fine. Now I would like to allow the user to select the values declared in the lists to allow a wider variety of selection (e.g. rather than displaying a list of 'Plants', the list would switch to display a list of 'departments' or 'teams').

At the moment I use the following syntax (excerpts) ...

    [... code ... key declaration: ]
<xsl:key name="kplnt" match="PLANT" use="." />
    [... code ... selection form: ]
   <form name="formsel" id="formsel">
          [... code ... List of Plants: ]
    <label for="selplnt">Plant</label><br />
    <select size="5" name="selplnt" id="selplnt">
     <xsl:apply-templates select="//PLANT[generate-id()=generate-id(key('kplnt',.))]" mode="selectplnt">
     <xsl:sort order="ascending"/>
     </xsl:apply-templates>
    </select>
          [... code ... Run call to javascript: ]
    <input type="button" value="Run Select" onClick="filter(document.formsel.selplnt.value)"/>
    [... code ... End of form: ]
   </form>
    [... code ... Choose statement activated by selection of Plant $plnt: ]
<xsl:choose>
 <xsl:when test="$plnt">
    [... code ...]

[... Key declaration: ]
<xsl:template match="//PLANT[generate-id()=generate-id(key('kplnt',.))]" mode="selectplnt">
  <option value="{.}"><xsl:value-of select="."/></option>
</xsl:template>

Here I use javascript to apply filters to my display and so I am hoping that I can integrate an extra piece of code to 'flip' the contents of the List Boxes (in this example 'Plant'). Once I have got this working, then I will see if I can flip the display in the main body of the display. This would give a lot of extra flexibility and allow the users to browse a lot more data.

Anyway, I hope that somone out there has come across and has tackled similar issues and can point me in the right direction :-)

Many thanks,
Alan Searle

PS: I have done quite a lot of googling and notice that Jenny Tennison offers some examples of mixed sources of data and/or XSL. However, this seemed to be static whereas I am looking for a dynamic method that can be switched by the user.

You can sometimes achieve the flexibility you need by replacing an element name PLANT by an an expression *[name()=$param]. Unfortunately there are restrictions on where you can do this, for example XSLT 1.0 doesn't allow variables in a match pattern. For the kind of flexibility you are looking for, you may be better off using dynamically constructed or modified stylesheets - remember you can write stylesheets that transform stylesheets.



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