Re: newbie - parameters with/without values??

> can I build an XSL style sheet to take in parameters "gender" and
> "city", which may or may not have values, and *build* an XPath
> select expression that will find the right nodes?

yes, and for more complicated Xpath's that is the way to go, as building
an Xpath dynamically in one step isn't much fun in xslt (without using
proprietary extensions) however for simple selections such as the one
you suggest you don't really need to do a two stage process of generated
an XSLt file, unless you need that for other reasons, for example
the XPath

/my_document/person[not($gender) or $gender=gender]
                   [not($city) or $city=city]

will select all person nodes if $gender and $city are "" but will just 
select 
  <person>
      <name>Joe</name>
      <gender>Male</gender>
      <city>Boston</city>
  </person>

if  $gender='Male'

David

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