Re: Testing for ancestors

Luke,

I'm an XSL newbie myself, and I haven't done anything with the
"ancestor" axis, but I do have a few books, one of which is Michael
Kay's book "XSLT Programmer's Reference - 2nd Edition".  Here's what
p.363 says about the ancestor axis:

   Selects all the nodes that are ancestors of the starting node, in
   reverse document order.  The first node on the axis is the parent
   of the origin node, the second is its grandparent, and so on; the
   last node on the axis is the document root.

p.222 gives an example of using the ancestor axis, but the whole
example is too long to type in here, so I'll just type in a snippet
here:

   <xsl:template match="*">
      <xsl:comment>
         <xsl:value-of select="name()"/>
         <xsl:for-each select="ancestor::*"/>
              <xsl:sort select="position()" order="descending"
                               data-type="number"/>
              <xsl:text> within </xsl:text>
              <xsl:value-of select="name()"/>
          </xsl:for-each>
       </xsl:comment
       <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:template>

I think I got that right, but the jist of it for you is the use of the
"ancestor" axis.

HTH.

Hardy Merrill
      

>>> lshannon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 12/30/04 01:08PM >>>
Hi All;

I am pretty new to XSL so I apologize if this is a trivial question.

If you have a specific node somewhere in the tree, and you are
stepping
through the tree starting from the root. What is the best way to
determine
if a node is an ancestor of the selected one?

I am trying to write a recursive function that generates an html menu
(based
on specific nodes in an xml document) that gives the user the illusion
of
expanding and collapsing as they select various nodes in the menu.

Thanks,

Luke