If preceding-sibling question

XadRav · January 27th, 2011, 01:01 PM

My XML basically look something like this:

Code:

<Staff>
     <Row alphakey="doejohn" building="abc" class="Algebra" />
     <Row alphakey="doejohn" building="abc" class="Geometry" />
     <Row alphakey="personbob" building="abc" class="Calculus" />
     <Row alphakey="personbob" building="abc" class="Precalc" />
...
</Staff>

And my code looks a little like this:

Code:

<xsl:for-each select="$Row">
     <xsl:if test="not(@alphakey = preceding-sibling::Row[1]/@alphakey)">
         ...

For some reason, the test always comes back as true, no matter what. What I need it to do in this situation is only process the first instance of each teacher, and skip the rest. I have also tried this meathod...

Code:

<xsl:for-each select="$Row">
     <xsl:variable name="akey" select="@alphakey"/>
     <xsl:if test="not(preceding-sibling::Row[@alphakey=$akey])">
     ...

And the same thing happens. What am I doing wrong? Also, I am using xslt 1.0

EDIT: Fixed the code a little.

samjudson · January 27th, 2011, 01:10 PM

Try changing Rows[1] to Row[1] as you have no element names of <Rows>.

Also you could look at the previously mentioned Muenchian grouping, as using similar techniques (i.e. using the key() function with generate-id() function) you can accomplish the same thing, which depending on your dataset size could be more performant.
http://www.jenitennison.com/xslt/gro...muenchian.html

XadRav · January 27th, 2011, 09:06 PM

I am using Muenchian grouping to get that particular data set. What we're doing is we have a sql database filled with teachers and the classes they are teaching, a data view to group the teachers with their classes to our class catalog, and SharePoint calling that data view and importing it as XML every time the page is called, so all of the info on the page is to the second accurate and extremely dynamic. The way we have it set up (and it kind of has to be this way) is that the resulting data view shows each teacher-class combo (as shown in the code above) and I have a muenchian group set to group each teacher with their courses. However, the way it is all set up with SharePoint, it needs to go through each row to process the grouping, and when the loop reaches the teachers 2nd, 3rd, etc. row, is displays the group all over again. What I though would be the easiest way to fix this is to have the loop only process the first instance of the teacher, so the group would only be displayed once.

tl;rd; I am using Muenchian grouping, but I need the if statement to work for what I need to work properly.

XadRav · January 27th, 2011, 09:08 PM

Also, I meant to say Rows not row, it's just the weird way SharePoint is making the XML, so I changed the XML example to row instead of rows to avoid confusion...

samjudson · January 28th, 2011, 04:10 AM

It seems to work fine for me.

The following slightly modified template outputs only the first class for each teacher:

Code:

<xsl:template match="Staff">
	<xsl:for-each select="Row">
		<xsl:if test="not(@alphakey = preceding-sibling::Row[1]/@alphakey)">
				<xsl:copy-of select="."/>
			</xsl:if>
	</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>