break for-each loops, or limit amount of loops

warhero · July 3rd, 2007, 04:14 PM

How can I set a max number of loops.. Say I have 20 nodes that a select returns, but I only wan to loop for 5 of them?

in regular code:
for(i = 0; i < MYNUM; i++)

How can I accomplish this with XSLT?

Another question, how can I break out of a for-each of some CONDITION is met?

Thanks All.

joefawcett · July 4th, 2007, 01:19 AM

Try looking at the other questions, "breaking out of a loop" has been asked many times. Here is the answer: You can't break out of a loop as there is no such thing as a loop in XSLT. There are at least two ways to do what you need however. One is to test the position() of the node within an xsl:for-each or an xsl:template. If the position() function returns 5 or less process node else ignore it. A second way is to only select the first five nodes to start with:

Code:

<xsl:apply-templates select="myNodes[position() &lt; 6]"/>

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

mhkay · July 4th, 2007, 02:18 AM

You can't break out of a for-each loop because it isn't a loop. You have to imagine that all the items in the input sequence are processed in parallel, so processing one item can't influence how or whether subsequent items are processed.

Just select the items you want to be processed in the select expression for example

select="(//node)[position() <= 20]

to process the first 20 elements named "node".

If you really do need the processing of one item to depend on the result of processing previous items, you need to use recursion rather than for-each. There's the best part of a chapter in my book on this.

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