Re: Transform list of elements to a sorted and dynamic

so for the sorting of the elements I worked out the following, rather simple
and perhaps not quite elegant solution:

Now I have <$Rows * $Columns> items in the right order in $SortedItems and
may call them by this:

<xsl:for-each select="$SortedItems/item">
 <xsl:message select="position(),': ',name"/>
</xsl:for-each>

@Geert: I will try out your idea after a shower and breakfast and then
post experiences here.

Regards,
Jannis

Hi,

The easiest way of achieving this is by first sorting your items and then trying to put them into columns. Once the items are sorted, you can do something like:

<xsl:template match="item">
<xsl:if test="position() mod $columns = 1 or $columns = 1">
<tr>
<xsl:variable name="nextpos" select="position() + $columns" />
<xsl:apply-templates select=".|following-sibling::item[$nextpos > position()]" mode="column"/>
</tr>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="item" mode="column">
    <td>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node()"/>
    </td>
</xsl:template>

You need to sort in a separate step (two stylesheets or something like building a document fragment with sorted items or so) as the following-sibling axis always works on document order, which is not what you would like here...

Cheers,
Geert

Jannis Pohlmann wrote:

Good morning,

I have a list of items, e.g.:

<item>
 <name>Adoreable</name>
 <date>2004-12-11</date>
</item>
<item>
 <name>Adjustable</name>
 <date>2004-12-11</date>
</item>
<item>
 <name>Bulk</name>
 <date>2004-12-10</date>
</item>
<item>
 <name>Condensed</name>
 <date>2004-12-12</date>
</item>
<item>
 <name>Compromise</name>
 <date>2004-11-08</date>
</item>

and I want them to be transformed to a sorted and dynamic (columns and rows adjustable by variables - $Columns and $Rows) HTML table (using recent Version of Saxon and XSLT2.0). The sort element are the <date/>-Elements (descending), so the table output had to look like this ($Columns = 2, $Rows = 2):

<table>
 <tr>
   <td>Condensed</td>
   <td>Adjustable</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
   <td>Adoreable</td>
   <td>Bulk</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
   <td colspan="2">Compromise</td>
 </tr>
</table>

If there are not enough items to fill the columns of the last row its last <td> should
have a "colspan" attribute in order to satisfy layout requirements. No empty
rows should be created (e.g. if there are not enough items to fill all <$Rows> rows).

As you may see there exists a second sort element (<name/>, ascending) in my example
but this is no must-have feature.

An alternative way might be to select the first <$Columns * $Rows> items (sorted descendingly by <date/>, of course) - but I see no solution for this, right now.

Is there a way to handle this problem with the power of XSLT?
Regards,
Jannis