Alternative to last()function

vb89 · October 14th, 2009, 11:57 AM

As the title of the post indicates, can someone please suggest an alternative to the last()function. I'm basically looking for something that'll returns an integer representing the number of items in the current context. I just want to use something other than the last function b/c of performance issues.

Martin Honnen · October 14th, 2009, 12:04 PM

I don't think there is real alternative.
XPath has the count function so you could try to count the number of nodes you want to process.
And XSLT has the xsl:number element that also counts some nodes.
But none of that is a replacement for last() in my view.

vb89 · October 14th, 2009, 12:06 PM

So there's really nothing other than something like count($variable)?

samjudson · October 14th, 2009, 12:12 PM

I don't really know why last() should pose any performance issues, or rather I can't think of any alternative that is going to be more performant. Performance issues depend greatly on what processor you are using and how you have structured your XSLT as well, so telling us a bit more detail might help.

One alternative that springs to mind is to create a xsl:variable outside of the context and use the count() method. As I said, I can't imagine that this would be faster though.

mhkay · October 14th, 2009, 12:38 PM

There may be ways of writing your code that are faster under some circumstances on some processors. But there won't be any alternative that is always faster on every processor. So you need to say more about what your requirements are, what technology you ar using, and what the symptoms of your performance trouble are.