'email a friend' link in xslt

dbol · May 13th, 2010, 04:48 PM

I thought I was pretty close to getting this to work, but I could be way off. The system I'm using stores a variable called 'title' that keeps the title of an article stored. It also has 'url' which, as you guessed, keeps the URL of the article stored. I'd like to call both of these inside this snippet below to 'email a friend.'

The problem is, that snippet doesn't like the < and > signs. How else can I can I call that variable? I want the title of the article to be passed to the subject line. Once I get that, I'll figure out how to pass the URL variable to the body of the email.

Code:

            <div class="title">
              <a href="mailto:&amp;subject=<xsl:value-of select='title'/>&amp;body=<xsl:value-of select='url'/>">Email a Friend</a>
            </div>

mrame · May 14th, 2010, 03:09 AM

Change <xsl:value-of select='title'/> and <xsl:value-of select='url'/> with {title} and {url}

bonekrusher · May 14th, 2010, 01:33 PM

Additional Info:

They are called Attribute Value Templates.

see http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#attribute-value-templates

dbol · May 17th, 2010, 11:26 AM

The problem is, I cannot input the title and url for each article. They are being generated from an XSL loop above in the code from a SQL database.

samjudson · May 17th, 2010, 11:29 AM

No, we mean 'literally', replace the <xsl:value-of> bit with {elementname}.

Like this:

Code:

<div class="title">
              <a href="mailto:&amp;subject={title}&amp;body={url}">Email a Friend</a>
            </div>

If that doesn't work then perhaps showing us a bit more of your code and some of your input XML might help.

dbol · May 17th, 2010, 11:46 AM

Does not work. I get an error:

msgtype:error
code:2
module:Sablotron
URI:arg:/xsl
line:55
msg:XML parser error 4: not well-formed (invalid token)

This is the entire code:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="html" encoding="iso-8859-1"/>

<xsl:template match="/feeds">
<html>
  <head>
    <style>
      body     { color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; }
      H2 {font-size: 13pt; font-family: Arial;}
      a:link   {color: #006c43}
      a:visited{color: #006c43;}
      a:hover  {color: gray;}
      .date  {font-size: 9pt; font-family: Arial;}
      .source  {font-size: 9pt; font-family: Arial;}
      .title  {font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: #006c43; text-decoration: underline;}
      .ingress {font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-family: Times;}
      .match {font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-family: Verdana, arial, sans-serif;}
      .title a:link {font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: #006c43; text-decoration: underline;}
      .title a:visited{color: #006c43;}
      .title a:hover  {color: gray;}
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </body>
</html>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="feed">
  <h2><xsl:value-of select="name"/></h2>
  <table border="0">
    <xsl:for-each select="documents/document">
      <xsl:if test="(alike&lt;2 or docId=alike)">
        <tr>
          <td nowrap="" valign="top">
            <span class="date"><xsl:value-of select="createDate2"/>,</span> <span class="source"><xsl:value-of select="sourcename"/></span>
            <br/>
            <div class="title">
              <a>
                <xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="url"/></xsl:attribute>
                <xsl:attribute name="target">_blank</xsl:attribute>
                <xsl:value-of select="title2"/>
              </a>
            </div>
          </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td>
            <span class="ingress"><xsl:value-of select="ingress"/></span>
          </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td>
            <a href="mailto:&subject={title}&body={url}">Email a Friend</a>
          </td>
        </tr>
        <tr><td></td></tr>
      </xsl:if>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </table>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

The code takes articles from a database and outputs them into a webpage. I would like to add a line underneath the ingress (short description of article) that enables any user to email that particular article to a friend, and include the article title as the subject line, and the url in the body of the email.

samjudson · May 17th, 2010, 11:50 AM

OK, that error means that the document is not valid XML - this is because you need to encode the & symbol and replace it with "&".

dbol · May 17th, 2010, 12:17 PM

It worked!!!

This is great news! Thanks so much for your help!