I use <xsl:for-each.. and <xsl:if.. tags to query for a matching element's attribute (e.g. "name='TIN").

If exists Then
  I would like to EXIT the "xsl:for-each" loop immediately.

Note: if I do not exit it immediately, my post-action of the querying will repeat my preferred post-action multiple times.

How can I exit/terminate a loop? Can it be done using an alternative approach?

Please help! Happy Thanksgiving 07.

You have to treat xsl:for-each as if all the items in the input are processed in parallel rather than sequentially. If you think of it that way, it's immediately obvious that "exiting the loop" isn't a concept that makes sense.

There are several ways you can process all the items in a sequence up to the first one that satisfies some condition. The most elegant way is recursion: write a template or function that processes the first in the sequence and then calls itself to process the rest of the sequence, exiting when the condition is satisfied. If the items are sibling nodes in document order, you can find the first one F that satisfies the condition, and then do xsl:for-each select="$seq[. << $F]" (in 2.0) or $F/preceding-sibling::* (in 1.0).

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

Michael,

After reading your quick response of a new recursion to process a list of values. I immediately recognized a good example in page 224 of your book "XSLT 2.0 third edition" I bought recently.

I have tried it out. It works. Thank so much.