Hi all

I need help to extract some information from my xml randomly...

I have a structure like this:

<country id="1">
<page id="1">
<banner id="1">
<product id="1">...</product>
<product id="2">...</product>
</banner>
<banner id="2">
<product id="3">...</product>
<product id="2">...</product>
</banner>
</page>
<page>...</page>


What I need to do is, for each page, select only one banner containing only product, randomly...
Is it possible to do with xslt?

Thanks.

XSLT is as a language is defined so that if you run the stylesheet twice with the same parameters you should get the same output, therefore is doesn't contain any 'random()' type functions.

Depending on what language you are calling from you could pass in a random number as a parameter and use something like:

match="banner[position()=($param mod last())]"


/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

There's no random number function in XSLT, though there is one in the EXSLT library (www.exslt.org) which may be available for your processor. If not, you'll have to implement your own extension function, or pass a random number in as a parameter. It depends a bit what you want to achieve - if the same transformation is done twice, do you want the same random number or a different random number?

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