Re: Nestled Template Surrealism

Hi Oliver,

> I've created individual templates for each element in my xml
> document, with these nestled within several book[test] templates.
> Somewhere along the line I've made a mistake & now the document
> fails to display at all.
> What the problem is escapes me completely.

I think the root of your problem here is that you never apply
templates to the book elements. You need to have something like:

  <div align="center">
    <xsl:apply-templates />
  </div>

where at the moment you have a commented-out xsl:for-each.

> There is also a continuing problem getting the image_link template to
> process properly.

Your image_link template looks like:

<xsl:template match="image_link">
  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>
        <img>
          <xsl:attribute name="src">
            <xsl:choose>
              <xsl:when test="image_link != ''">
                <xsl:value-of select="image_link" />
              </xsl:when>
              <xsl:otherwise>null.gif</xsl:otherwise>
            </xsl:choose>
          </xsl:attribute>
        </img>
      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</xsl:template>

Aside from the fact that you're producing a table with a single row
and a single cell in it (which is a bit weird) your problem here is
that when you try to set the value of the src attribute, you're
testing whether the *current node* has an image_link child element.
In this template, the current node *is* an image_link element, so
really you want to test, and use the value of, the current node
instead. So swap 'image_link' for '.' in the template:

<xsl:template match="image_link">
  ...
        <img>
          <xsl:attribute name="src">
            <xsl:choose>
              <xsl:when test=". != ''">
                <xsl:value-of select="." />
              </xsl:when>
              <xsl:otherwise>null.gif</xsl:otherwise>
            </xsl:choose>
          </xsl:attribute>
        </img>
  ...
</xsl:template>

or, equivalently:

<xsl:template match="image_link">
  ...
        <img>
          <xsl:attribute name="src">
            <xsl:value-of select="." />
            <xsl:if test="not(string())">null.gif</xsl:if>
          </xsl:attribute>
        </img>
  ...
</xsl:template>

or even:

<xsl:template match="image_link">
  ...
        <img src="{concat(., substring('null.gif',
                                       1 div not(string())))}" />
  ...
</xsl:template>

I hope that helps,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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