Hello

I'm trying to merge several xml files into one master file but is sofar without success. All help is appreciated.

The scenario is as follows

All source xml files have two sets of data: clients and items
each client is identified using the client name and a numeric id which is referenced from the items. One file can look like this:

<client>
  <id>1</id>
  <name>client A</name>
</client>
<client>
  <id>2</id>
  <name>client C</name>
</client>
<client>
  <id>3</id>
  <name>client F</name>
</client>
<item>
  <cliNo>1</cliNo>
  <id>0000103007-2007-1</id>
  <name>item 100</name>
</item>
<item>
  <cliNo>1</cliNo>
  <id>0000103007-2007-2</id>
  <name>item 100</name>
</item>
<item>
  <cliNo>2</cliNo>
  <id>0000103007-2007-3</id>
  <name>item 200</name>
</item>
<item>
  <cliNo>3</cliNo>
  <id>0000103007-2007-4</id>
  <name>item 200</name>
</item>

This structure is repeated in all source xml files, in each source file the client is defined and only referenced from the items but different source xml files may have the same client defined using a different id, so in order to merge the clients I have to make a global client list containing all clients by name and issue new id values where the id is used by a different client (does this make sense??)
The Item id should be unique no matter which source xml file are used, but also here there might be identical items, but for now assume that these are unique.

The case is: merge several xml files with identical structure into one xml (still with the same structure) but sort clients based on client name and items based on item id.

Please help

Looks like a multi-pass problem to me: break the problem down into a number of smaller problems.

There's an element of grouping here and grouping problems, especially cross-document grouping problems, are always easier with XSLT 2.0.

Phase 1 is probably to build your consolidated client file, which can be done something like:

<xsl:for-each-group select="collection(....)/x/client" group-by="name">
  <client>
    <id><xsl:value-of select="position()"/></id>
    <name><xsl:value-of select="current-grouping-key"/></name>

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