XSLT n00b question

rockypg · October 3rd, 2006, 09:40 AM

Hi,

Im just beginning to learn XSLT from w3schools' pages and I ran into this difficulty:

my XML looks like this
<data>
    <option value="76">Accounting</option>
    <option value="324">Acoustics</option>
    <option value="87">Actuarial Science</option>
</data>

I would like to list all the values of the <option> tags.
This XSLT just repeats the first value multiple times

<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
  <body>
    <h2>options</h2>
    <xsl:for-each select="data/option">
      <p><xsl:value-of select="/data/option"/></p>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>

what should I change to get
  Accounting
  Acoustics
  Actuarial Science

instead of
  Accounting
  Accounting
  Accounting

Thanks in advance

rockypg · October 3rd, 2006, 09:45 AM

Never mind I figured it out for myself within minutes of making this posting.
Sorry for the noise.

In case somebody else is wondering, the correct line is
<p><xsl:value-of select="."/></p>

mhkay · October 3rd, 2006, 09:52 AM

w3schools, I find, is great for quick reference to the details, but not strong on teaching the underlying concepts. There are three things you need to know here:

(a) xsl:for-each establishes a current node. Within the for-each, you will normally make selections relative to the current node. You can refer to the current node as ".", so for example <xsl:value-of select="."/> gives you the string value of the current node.

(b) a path expression starting with "/" selects from the root of the document. Using it inside a for-each will therefore give you the same selection each time.

(c) In XSLT 1.0, if <xsl:value-of select=..."/> selects multiple nodes, then only the first one is displayed. That's "Accounting" in your case.

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

rockypg · October 3rd, 2006, 10:09 AM

Thanks for the insight Michael.

How would I do the same without using "xsl:for-each" like you mentioned on a different thread?

<xsl:template match="/data/option">
  <html>
  <body>
        <h2>Options</h2>
              <xsl:value-of select="."/><br/>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

doesn't seem to do it..

mhkay · October 3rd, 2006, 10:23 AM

That code is fine, so long as there's an apply-templates somewhere that actually selects the /data/option element for processing.

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