Hi David,

> I should have stressed that not only do I want to ouput all the
> elements using recursion but I also want, effectively to know how
> many ancestors they each have in order to structure the output so it
> makes clear the hierarchical structure of the data.

You can do that in two ways. You can count the number of ancestors of
the <item> element that you're on using:

  count(ancestor::item)

Alternatively, you can pass a parameter into the template, adding one
on each recursion, as in:

<xsl:template match="item">
  <xsl:param name="ancestors" select="0" />
  ...
  <xsl:apply-templates>
    <xsl:with-param name="ancestors" select="$ancestors + 1" />
  </xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:template>

If you're dealing with very deep hierarchies, using a parameter will
probably be speedier.

Cheers,

Jeni

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


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