Hi All,

I have a need to select all nodes that are missing children that meet a certain criteria. I think it's best illustrated with an example:

<Root>
  <SomeTag Ordinal="1">
    <TagDetail N="Owner" V="Bob"/>
    <TagDetail N="Category" V="Good Stuff"/>
    <TagDetail N="Category" V="Foo"/>
  </SomeTag>
  <SomeTag Ordinal="2">
    <TagDetail N="Owner" V="Jerry"/>
  </SomeTag>
  <SomeTag Ordinal="3">
    <TagDetail N="Owner" V="Allison"/>
    <TagDetail N="ExpireDate" V="13 Aug 2007"/>
    <TagDetail N="Category" V="Foo"/>
  </SomeTag>
</Root>

I'd like to select all SomeTag elements that do not have a TagDetail child element with a N="Category" attribute. So in this case, the nodeset returned would be only the second SomeTag element, since it's the only one that doesn't have a TagDetail with a Category.

I thought it'd be possible with something like:

select="SomeTag/TagDetail[not(@N='Category')]"

but that doesn't work. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Bill

Scince you want the SomeTag element, you should limit your selection up to it. Maybe something like:
------
<xsl:for-each select="problem"><xsl:value-of select="solution"></xsl:for-each>

I'd like to select all SomeTag elements that do not have a TagDetail child element with a N="Category" attribute

SomeTag[not(TagDetail/@N='Category')]

when you think about it your idea of

SomeTag/TagDetail[not(@N='Category')]

clearly can't work because it selects TagDetail elements and you're looking for cases where there isn't a TagDetail element to select.

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

That worked! Thanks a lot, much appreciated ...

Bill