Hello all,
I am transforming my xml dokument (library.xml) via xsl to create a HTML table with first row containing columns : Category, Name of the book, Author. My document is sorted by Category.And the other rows are printed by for-each cycle,everything is OK except one thing:

My problem is that I am printing all rows, and don't want to print the attribut value of category every time, only once. I need to write "if condition" telling if actual element(book) with value of attribute Category has already occured (has been printed) in document. If not, then print the value (for ex. Sport, Education)in the other case, don't print it.
Here is a screenshot of what I mean : http://jendys.webz.cz/screen.jpg

I will be grategul if someone could help me. Thnx. Jendys

HI Jendy,

Welcome to the forum. Please provide a sample of the XML and your XSLT. This would make it easy for someone to answer your question.

Thanks

Here is my sample of library.xml :
<library>
            <book id="1" name="Fyzika" category="Hudebniny">
                <author>Jaroslava NeteÄ?n??</author>
                <publisher="adresa" place="NA" year="2000" ></publisher>
                <isbn>200399990000</isbn>
                <other new="NO" description="NA dfs"></other>
            </book>

            <book id="6" nazev="Matika" category="Hudebniny">
                <author>Petr Sladil</author>
                <publisher="Koldat" misto_vydani="NA" year="2000" ></punlisher>
                <isbn>2005</isbn>
                <other news="No" description="NA dfs"></other>
            </book>

</library>

And here is sample xsl:


<table width="70%" border="0" align="center">
    <tr bgcolor="#252836" valign="middle" height="30">

      <th align="center" style="color:#929AB6">Category</th>
      <th align="center" style="color:#929AB6">Name</th>
      <th align="center" style="color:#929AB6">Author</th>
    </tr>

<xsl:for-each select="library/book">
<xsl:sort select="@category"/>
  <tr>
  <th bgcolor="#4E5774" style="color:#AAB1C4">
         <xsl:choose>
         <xsl:when test="following-sibling::*/@category=library/@category">
          <h2 align="center" style="color:white">Something</h2>
        </xsl:when>
       <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:value-of select="@category"/><xsl:text> </xsl:text>
       </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
   </th>
    <xsl:choose>
         <xsl:when test="other/@news ='Yes'">
              <th bgcolor="#727E9E" align="center"><span style="color:white;font-style:normal" ><xsl:value-of select="@name"/><xsl:text></xsl:text></span></th>
              <th bgcolor="#727E9E" align="center"><span style="color:white;font-style:normal" ><xsl:value-of select="author"/></span></th>
           </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
      <th bgcolor="#4E5774" align="center"><span style="color:white;font-style:normal" ><xsl:value-of select="@name"/><xsl:text></xsl:text></span></th>
      <th bgcolor="#4E5774" align="center"><span style="color:white;font-style:normal" ><xsl:value-of select="author"/></span></th>
    </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>

        </tr>
</xsl:for-each>
</table>

As you can see i have been trying to solve it comparing following with actual value, but i learned that it is not possible

Hi, You can use the position() function.

Hi, thank you very much! I was playing with the idea of using position, but I did not find so much information about that.But thanx anyway

Here is a good site for XPATH and XSLT

http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath...ns.asp#context

Looks to me as if

<xsl:when test="following-sibling::*/@category=library/@category">

is wrong for four reasons:

(a) you only want to look at the immediately following sibling, which is following-sibling::*[1]/@category

(b) the path library/@category is wrong because (i) the library element doesn't have an @category attribute, and (ii) the context node in a book element which doesn't have a library child

(c) you don't want to do something different when the following sibling has the same value, you want to do something different when the preceding sibling doesn't have the same value.

So I think you want:

<xsl:if test="not(preceding-sibling::*[1]/@category=@category)">
  <xsl:value-of select="@category"/>
</xsl:if>

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

Alternatively you can treat it as a grouping problem. Group on category then for each category output the first book in that category in full then for the others the information except the category. There are links to examples of grouping in the first post in the XSLT forum.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

Thanks for replies. I was thinking of possibility to group, but i searched for simplified solution.I will try it. Thanx!

It works!
I also made a mistake in row */@category=library/@category"> there should be */@category=book/@category"> of course, because I am from Czech Republic and was rewriting the code to English :-)and made this mistake. Thanx to all!