XSL and colons

Navy1991_1 · June 10th, 2008, 06:31 AM

I need help on how to work in a colon tag. If I leave the ":" in I receive an error, however if I don't include I don't get the value needed.

Example:
<xsl:value-of select="/n1:ClinicalDocument/n1:documentationOf/n1:serviceEvent/n1:performer/n1:assignedEntity/n1:sdtc:patient/n1:sdtc:id/@extension"/>

Martin Honnen · June 10th, 2008, 06:34 AM

Can you show us the XML you want to process?
Is that well-formed XML with namespaces?

--
Martin Honnen
Microsoft MVP - XML

mhkay · June 10th, 2008, 06:37 AM

A name that contains a colon is called a "Qualified Name" or QName. The part before the colon is a namespace prefix. It's a shorthand for the namespace URI, which tells you which namespace the name is in. To select elements or attributes that are in a namespace, you need to get the namespace right, just as you need to get the local name right.

Since you're clearly unfamiliar with the terminology, it looks to me as if you need to do some more reading around the subject. Wrox do some excellent books...

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

samjudson · June 10th, 2008, 06:39 AM

A colon in a XML element name is not valid - therefore you might be getting confused over your namespace declarations, but without seeing your source document and your namespace declarations its hard to say.

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

Navy1991_1 · June 10th, 2008, 06:39 AM

XML document is very lengthy, however here is the section that contains what I am wanting to capture.

<sdtc:patient>
<sdtc:id root="78A150ED-B890-49dc-B716-5EC0027B3983" extension="123456789" />
</sdtc:patient>

Navy1991_1 · June 10th, 2008, 06:44 AM

Own that wonderful book that you speak of. You are correct I was unaware of QNames. Now that I know what to look for I will read up on this section.

Thanks!

Martin Honnen · June 10th, 2008, 06:45 AM

Assuming your input XML has e.g. xmlns:sdtc="http://example.com/foo" your stylesheet needs e.g.

Code:

<xsl:stylesheet
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:sdtc="http://example.com/foo"
  xmlns:n1="http://example.com/bar"
  version="1.0">

<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:value-of select="/n1:ClinicalDocument/n1:documentationOf/n1:serviceEvent/n1:performer/n1:assignedEntity/sdtc:patient/sdtc:id/@extension"/>

--
Martin Honnen
Microsoft MVP - XML

Navy1991_1 · June 10th, 2008, 09:07 PM

Thank you!