Hey guys,

I have a problem with XSLT and hopefully someone here can help.

I have the Northwind database and i need to create a stylesheet that will accept a parameter that is the companyID. the output file will then display a table of all the orders for the selected customer.

Ideally i need to display a list of all the customer ID's in a table, then the user can select one as a hyperlink which will link to an anchor at the bottom of the page with a table displaying a list of all the orders for the selected customer.

If anyone has any idea how to do this i would be extremely greatful. I have worked out how to display the customer ID's in a list but need to know how to link to a table below is with the order details for the selected. Here is my code so far.


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<xsl:output method="xml"/>
<xsl:param name="CustID"/>

<xsl:template match="ROOT">

    <xhtml:html>
        <xhtml:body>
            <xhtml:h1>NORTHWIND DATABASE</xhtml:h1>
            <xhtml:table>
            <xhtml:tr>
            <xhtml:th>Customer ID</xhtml:th>
            <xhtml:th>Company Name</xhtml:th>
            </xhtml:tr>
            <xsl:apply-templates/>
            </xhtml:table>
        </xhtml:body>
    </xhtml:html>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="Customers">
    <xhtml:tr>
    <xhtml:td>
        <xhtml:a href="assign2.xslt?CustID={@CustomerID}">
        <xsl:value-of select="@CustomerID"/>
        </xhtml:a>
    </xhtml:td>
    <xhtml:td>
        <xsl:value-of select="@CompanyName"/>
    </xhtml:td>
    </xhtml:tr>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>


Thanks in advance,
Matt

PS. I am using the xalan XSLT parser.

A parameterised stylesheet is probably an inefficient way of doing things as you will need to return the order information for all customers and then filter for the chosen customer ID. It would normally be better to query for just the relevant customer orders and then transform this into a user friendly page.

I'm not sure it is possible to do it the way you want, by passing the customer ID to the stylesheet in the querystring. Normally you would pass the ID to a server-side page, possibly JSP if you are using Java. You then retrieve the order XML, set the parameter and apply the transform.

For more advice you will have to detail your process more. Where is the processing taking place, server-side, client-side or both? What technologies are you employing?

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

Thanks for the reply Joe,

I agree this is a bad way of doing things but we have been given a university assignment that states we must do things this way. I have found a way of doing it where i can parse in the customer name or order number as a parameter to see a summary. Now all i need to do is figure out how to use Xpath to total up the orders.

Cheers
Matt

I don't know your source XML document, but I'm a bit surprised you're outputting one table row per "Customers" element, rather than one per "Customer".


You haven't really made it clear whether you want to generate a single HTML page that contains full information for all the customers, or whether you want to go back to the server when the user clicks the link. In the latter case you need to write some server-side code that picks up the query parameter from the URL and feeds this as a parameter into a second stylesheet which generates the detail page for a given customer. The details then depend on whether you are using ASP, PHP, Java servlets, or whatever.

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