Hallo everyone,

In my XSL, I have declared a number of keys, including the following ...

<xsl:key name="krefplant" match="ref_team" use="PLANT_CODE" />
<xsl:key name="krefteam" match="ref_team" use="TEAM_CODE" />

Then, later in the stylesheet, I use these first to retrieve the PLANT_TEXT:

<td><xsl:value-of select="key('krefplant', $pfiltfld)[1]/PLANT_TEXT" /></td>

... then I get the teamcode (part of a current running definition):

<td><xsl:value-of select="teamcode" /></td>

Then I try to store the teamcode:

$pteamcodestore=<xsl:value-of select="teamcode" />

... to use to retrieve the TEAM_NAME:

<td><xsl:value-of select="key('krefteam', $pteamcodestore)[1]/TEAM_NAME" /></td>

This all works fine (i.e. I can retrieve the PLANT_TEXT) except for the retrieval of the TEAM_NAME. Here, if I hard-code a specific teamcode (e.g. 'abc'), then I get the TEAM_NAME but if I tried to parameterise by grabbing the current teamcode =<xsl:value-of select="teamcode" /> and then either using or storing this, then the processing falls over and the literal values are displayed:

$pteamcodestore=AFB-S

So I imagine that I am trying to do something illegal here: I am trying to take a value retrieved from the current template and use that to filter a Key() clause.

So my question now is whether there is any way around this?

Or maybe I should be approaching the issue in a completely different way?

All I really want to do here is a kind of 'look-up': My template is happily returning the data that I require (relating to team and labelled with teamcode) and so I want to query a list of teams (held in a different place in the same XML file) and return the text description of that team. My code will return the value when I hardcode the criteria but not when I try an pick it up from the current record of the current template.

Am I trying to be too procedural here? Or is there a trick?

Any tips would really help to get me going.

Many thanks,
Alan Searle.

$pteamcodestore=<xsl:value-of select="teamcode" />


That's not how you bind a variable in XSLT. Use

<xsl:variable name="pteamcodestore" select="teamcode"/>

(Or select="$teamcode")

I suspect there are other bugs in your code concerning context, but without a source document or real code, as distinct from fragments, I can't be sure.

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

Hi Michael,

> That's not how you bind a variable in XSLT. Use
<xsl:variable name="pteamcodestore" select="teamcode"/>

Fantastic: That fixed it!

Indeed, I am very pleased now as I have split my reference data (lists of teams and suppliers) out of the main body of data and have inserted these into the same XML file thus ...

<dataroot>
 <team>
  <teamdetails>
  ...
  </teamdetails>
 </team>
 <supplier>
  <supplierdetails>
  ...
  </supplierdetails>
 </supplier>
 <salesdata>
  <salesdatadetails>
  ...
  </salesdatadetails>
 </salesdata>
</dataroot>

I also stripped out any '0' values and replaced them with NULL so that they aren't exported to the XML file.

I found that this greatly reduced the size of the XML (i.e. descriptive information had been moved to the 'reference zones') and at the same time meant that I could use key() and generate-id() to do the grouping and summing on the file. I also reduced the length of field names which also helped reduce the size of the file.

With the reduced file size the response time also jumped from 50 secs to 5 secs.

I hope this posting will help others and am wondering if this is the correct way to do it? I hope so :-)

> I suspect there are other bugs in your code concerning context, but
> without a source document or real code, as distinct from fragments,
> I can't be sure.

Your probably right as I am still a bit shakey on the logic but think/hope it is coming now.

Many thanks for your help.

Regards,
Alan.