I have written XSL to display city, companyname in Table structure .based on the criteria node's sorting i will have to either sort the data by City or Comp_name when it appears for the first time ...

I tried this ..globally i did <xsl:variable name="sortmethod" select="//criteria/sortby">

SOmewhere down in my template where i write xsl:for i do this ....
<xsl:for-each select="//regions">
      <xsl:sort  order="ascending"  select="name()=$sortmethod"/>
</xsl:for-each>

Does that work??

-kumar