Hope someone in here can help me with this one, its got me stumped.

I have XML data for a CD collection and a stylesheet that I have setup to sort it as need be (i.e. by artist, by album name, etc). However, since the library is rather large I want the stylesheet to be able to accept parameters for a range of items to return (say the first 100, or the last 50, or whatever). How can I accomplish this in conjunction with my sorting?

Here is some sample XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<library>
<album>
<ID>1234</ID>
<Name><![CDATA[Paul's Boutique]]></Name>
<Artist><![CDATA[The Beastie Boys]]></Artist>
<Genre><![CDATA[Rap/Hip-Hop]]></Genre>
<Rating>8.5</Rating>

</album>

<album>
<ID>5678</ID>
<Name><![CDATA[Document]]></Name>
<Artist><![CDATA[R.E.M]]></Artist>
<Genre><![CDATA[Rock]]></Genre>
<Rating>7</Rating>

</album>

<album>
<ID>9988</ID>
<Name><![CDATA[Kind Of Blue]]></Name>
<Artist><![CDATA[Miles Davis]]></Artist>
<Genre><![CDATA[Jazz]]></Genre>
<Rating>8.9</Rating>

</album>

</library>


And my stylesheet (note the variables I have declared for start and end index):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="1.0">
<xsl:output encoding="utf-8" method="xml" indent="yes"/>

<xsl:param name="startIndex" select="0" />
<xsl:param name="endIndex" select="10" />

<xsl:template match="library">

<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates>
<xsl:sort data-type="text" select="Artist" order="ascending"/>
</xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:copy>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Try replacing your match="*" template by

<xsl:template match="album">
  <xsl:if test="position() &gt; $startIndex and position() &lt; $endIndex">
     <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
  </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

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

thanx for the reply Michael but I was matching 'library' in my other template where I do my sort so if I change the '*' to 'library' i'd have both templates matching on the same thing.

Its really like I need to combine them into one so that it:
1)sorts the full xml according to my sort clause
2)then applies my filter to pull a range of records

so for example I could sort by artist ascending, then take records 10-20

but this appears to work! I like simple solutions, I think I was over thinking this one:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="1.0">
  <xsl:output encoding="utf-8" method="xml" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:param name="startIndex" select="3" />
  <xsl:param name="endIndex" select="8" />

  <xsl:template match="library">

    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates>
         <xsl:sort data-type="text" select="Artist" order="ascending"/>
         </xsl:apply-templates>
    </xsl:copy>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="*">
   <xsl:if test="position() &gt;= $startIndex and position() &lt;= $endIndex">
     <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
  </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

damn, so close...this actually works exactly as it should as long as the xml looks just like my example. Unfortunately I overlooked a small detail. In addition to the album nodes under library the actual xml also contains some informational elements (it comes from a webservice, so for example it provides the total number or records, a status code, etc)

So because I have these additional nodes, my greedy template match on "*" will process those informational elements as well and count those in its processing, so I get bogus results for the start and end indices.

Anyone have any insight to how I can solve this?

I'm not sure why you're stumped - where have you been looking for information?

Just change <xsl:apply-templates> to <xsl:apply-templates select="Album"/>.

Could I suggest you do some reading around the language?

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

apologies, I could have sworn that was one of the first things I tried and it didn't work. I have a bunch of additional parameters I'm passing into my stylesheet and I suspect I had messed set wrong there and it was giving me weird results. I should have stripped it down to the basics to test, sorry. Thanx for your help