Hi everyone,

I did a few searches to see if I could find an example to help me out, but so far haven't had any luck. This I turn myself over to you for a little assistance here.

I'm working with Ecrion's 2007 Rendering suite and we've been looking into the xChart features that are a part of it. The basic layout and structure is the same, just a custom set of tags for defining datapoint and other types of graph information.

The syntax for a graph looks something like this:


<xc:graph x="5pt" y="5pt" width="8.00 in" height="3.0in">
   <xc:value-axis orientation="vertical" min="0" max="100">
      <xc:title font-weight="bold">Y Axis</xc:title>
   </xc:value-axis>
   <xc:category-axis orientation="horizontal">
      <xc:title font-weight="bold">X Axis</xc:title>
   </xc:category-axis>
   <xc:plot-area>
      <xc:serie stroke-color="yellow" stroke-width="1.0pt">
         <xc:data-point category="1993" value="30"/>
         <xc:data-point category="1995" value="50"/>
         <xc:data-point category="1997" value="10"/>
         <xc:data-point category="2000" value="20"/>
      </xc:serie>
   </xc:plot-area>
</xc:graph>


This will give me a nice little line graph and everything is good. Now the problem I'm running into is that I don't want hardcoded values in my plot-area. I want to be able to read through an XML file and create my points dynamically. I've tried several different ways to do this, and haven't hit upon something that works just yet. The most logical to me seemed to be the following:


   .
   .
   .
   <xc:serie stroke-color="yellow" stroke-width="1.0pt">
         <xsl:for-each select="ROW">
            <xc:data-point>
               category="<xsl:value-of select="YEAR"/>"
               value="<xsl:value-of select="VALUE"/>"
            </xc:data-point>
         </xsl:for-each>
   </xc:serie>
   .
   .
   .


Now, this doesn't work and I was wondering if there is a way to somehow embed a value-of call inside another set of tags. Something like this:

<xc:data-point category="<xsl:value-of select="YEAR"/>" value="xsl:value-of select="VALUE""/>

I'm at a bit of a loss to get this kind of thing working, and without it the entire graphing suite is useless. Any kind of help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! :)

You can't have elements inside attributes:

category="<xsl:value-of select="YEAR"/>"
               value="<xsl:value-of select="VALUE"/>"


you want attribute value templates:

category="{YEAR}"
value="{VALUE}"

I'd suggest you need a better approach to learning XSLT than "finding an example to help me out". It's a fairly complicated language and you're gonig to find it very frustrating if you try to learn it by trial and error. Wrox do some good books.

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

I've been working with this stuff for a few months, and yes, it can be very frustrating. Having reference books is great, true enough, but they're not much help when you're not sure exactly what you're LOOKING for. Attribute value templates look very promising, thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I will have to disagree with you on learning via example though. I find that's the best way to learn new things. It can also lead you in new directions you'd have never thought of by simply looking things up in a book.

>I will have to disagree with you on learning via example though.

Well, everyone has their own style. I find the approach very frustrating because you end up developing your own theories as to how something works, and then you try something new based on that theory (as you did in this posting) and then you dont understand why it doesn't work. Another classic example is where people try to write code that outputs start tags and end tags independently of each other - that's a clear result of the consequences of building a faulty mental model. I much prefer start by doing some reading to discover the underlying concepts.

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

The attribute value templates worked like a charm. Thanks very much. I don't know that I'd have found it on my own. :)