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Neal Walters

Subject: Group Compare
Author: Neal Walters
Date: 28 Apr 2006 03:11 PM

In XSLT, I want to compare the entire group of an element.
For example, I have OriginalProfile and EditedProfile, and if anything is different between the two (such as home phone, work phone, cell phone, email, address, etc... I want to perform an action.

If I just do
<xslt:if test="OriginalProfile != EditedProfile")

I'm thinking it will just compare the text value of the group, not the values of everything under the group.

Is there an easy way to do what I'm asking? Or do I have to have a humungous if statement that compares oldWorkPhone to newWorkPhone, and oldCellPhone to NewCellPhone, etc...

Thanks,
Neal Walters
http://Biztalk-Training.com

Ivan Pedruzzi

Subject: Group Compare
Author: Ivan Pedruzzi
Date: 28 Apr 2006 03:38 PM

Hi Neal,

In XPath 1.0 the operator = between two node-sets is defined as

"
If both objects to be compared are node-sets, then the comparison will be true if and only if there is a node in the first node-set and a node in the second node-set such that the result of performing the comparison on the string-values of the two nodes is true.
"

When comparing two nodes only text nodes are considered so for instance comparing the following nodes return true even if they have a different child (name vs. newname)

<OriginalProfile>
<name>Ivan</name>
</OriginalProfile>

<EditedProfile>
<newname>Ivan</newname>
</EditedProfile>

Hope this helps
Ivan Pedruzzi
Stylus Studio Team

Neal Walters

Subject: Group Compare
Author: Neal Walters
Date: 03 May 2006 11:07 AM

So what is an elegant solution for this situation?

I have two profiles, a before and after. They have maybe 20 fields, name, addresses, city, state, zip, multiple phones, multiple emails, etc...

I basically want to know if the one profile is equal to the other or not.

Right now we have a map that has a nasty if statement that compares old first name to new first name, old last name to new last name, old address to new address, old city to new city, etc, etc, etc...

So, if we ever add an element to the structure, the if statement is out of date, and also the if statement is just extremely hard to read. When we click the format button in Stylus Studio, the whole if statement goes to one line, which is something like 2000 characters wide. I normally like the reformat button, but in this case it make the code very hard to read.

Any suggestions to improve my ugly XSLT?

Thanks,
Neal Walters
http://Biztalk-Training.com

Ivan Pedruzzi

Subject: Group Compare
Author: Ivan Pedruzzi
Date: 03 May 2006 03:10 PM

Neal,

I wrote a simple generic XSLT template called deep-diff that calculates the differences between two nodes, it should be sufficient to solve your problem. The template assumes that sub-elements are in the same position

Hope this helps
Ivan Pedruzzi
Stylus Studio Team

Ivan Pedruzzi

Subject: Group Compare
Author: Ivan Pedruzzi
Date: 03 May 2006 03:11 PM

... and the xml to test

Ivan Pedruzzi
Stylus Studio Team

Neal Walters

Subject: Group Compare
Author: Neal Walters
Date: 03 May 2006 06:17 PM

WOW! That's really cool. Did you have that in your bag of tricks already?

For now, I just need to know if they are the same or not.
The other day, I think I learned that it is impossible to return a variable from a called-template, is that true? Is there a nice get-around?

In other words, can I set a $same flag to true or false, and return it from the called template?

Thanks again,
Neal Walters
http://Biztalk-Training.com

Ivan Pedruzzi

Subject: Group Compare
Author: Ivan Pedruzzi
Date: 03 May 2006 07:26 PM

Nope you have capture the template result in a variable then check if it contains nodes

<xsl:variable name="compare">
<xsl:call-template name="deep-diff">
<xsl:with-param name="p1" select="books/book[1]" />
<xsl:with-param name="p2" select="books/book[2]" />
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:variable>

<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="count(msxsl:node-set($compare)/*) > 0">
the nodes are different
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>the nodes are equal</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

Hope this helps
Ivan Pedruzzi
Stylus Studio Team

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