document function and counting

I am trying to use the document function to pull in the result trees of
other documents and then I want to number things across the entire new
document in one pass.

For example say I have a file called master.xml which contains uri's to
other documents called foo1.xml and foo2.xml.  Say foo1.xml and foo2.xml
each contain a list of <item> tags.

I want the output of the transformation to be a document which contains
all of the <item>s of both foo1.xml and foo2.xml AND I want to number them
continuously from the top to the bottom.  I want to do this in one pass of
a stylesheet.

I can pull foo1.xml and foo2.xml into the output file using document().
Also, if all of the items are already in the same document I can easily
number them using the <xsl:number> tag.  However, it is not possible to do
both in the same run of the stylesheet because xsl:number does not seem to
have access to the elements in main.xml and either foo1.xml or foo2.xml at
the same time. So I can reach my goal if I write two stylesheets and run
them one after each other, but I don't want to do that.

Alternatively, I have tried using parameters to pass a number into the
item template.  However, I don't know how to get this information from the
point where the template matches an <item> in foo1.xml to a point where it
matches <item> in foo2.xml.  That is, I cannot pass parameters up the
tree.

Could someone please explain how I should do this?  Or, is it even
possible?

Thank you so much for your time.

Sarah Coppin





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