Re: Severe limitation of the xsl:key element with mult

Jerome Louvel wrote:
> But now we need to define XSLT keys in our source documents so we tried to
> use the following declaration:
> <xsl:key name="key_1" match="document('id:042C5210')/codesTable/entry/value"
> use="../code" />
> 
> And we discovered that Xalan rejects this because of the presence of the
> document() function call.
> After checking the spec we discovered that the "match" attribute of the
> xsl:key element must be a pattern (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#NT-Pattern) and
> not an expression (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#NT-Expr).
> 
> This prevents us from declaring any keys in our case which we find to be a
> severe limitation in XSLT 1.0.
> So we checked latest XSLT 2.0 working draft and found that the same
> constraint.
> 
> Are we missing something? 

Yes, you apparently didn't see XSLT 1.0 section 12.2, at the very end. It
tells you how to do exactly what you're asking for.

A key applies to nodes that match a pattern, no matter what document they
occur in. The key *function*, however, only checks the keys of nodes in the
document containing the context node. So just change the temporarily context
node with xsl:for-each before you call key().

Mike

-- 
  Mike J. Brown   |  http://skew.org/~mike/resume/
  Denver, CO, USA |  http://skew.org/xml/

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list