Is there any method by which an XSLT can hold state?

padleywoods · February 12th, 2015, 09:38 AM

The output I need to produce via XSLT wraps certain elements in "Group" tags - i.e.

<Group_12>
<Element1>A</Element1>
<Element2>B</Element2>
<Element3>C</Element3>
</Group_12>
<Group_15>
<Element4>D</Element4>
</Group_15>
<Group_17>
<Element5>E</Element5>
<Element6>F</Element6>
</Group_17>

The numbering of the groups will not necessarily be in sequence, as shown above, but will always be greater than the previous group number. In order to produce the output, the previously written <Group_xx> number must be referencable within the XSLT.

Any help/suggestions gratefully received.

Martin Honnen · February 12th, 2015, 10:43 AM

It is not considered good design to put index or count numbers into XML element or attribute names, as you seem to want to do. As for "holding state", unless you play with XSLT 3.0 accumulators or iterate there is no directly comparable concept but of course you can write templates or functions (functions since XSLT 2.0) which take parameters and call themselves recursively, passing on the state in a parameter. Whether all that is necessary is difficult to tell, so far you have only shown the output you want but no input you want to process and how the input is mapped to the output.