Re: Help moving away from named templates

Thank you David and Abel for your patience and thank you for
formulating (for me!) what part of my question actually is.

You're right. There are structural differences between the customer
XML and the customer's contacts XML. I apologize for being imprecise.
Let's give a simplistic version of the two:

Customer.xml
<Records>
  <Record>
     <id>6</id>
     <firstName>Steve</firstName>
  </Record>
</Records>

eContacts.xml
<Records>
 <Record>
    <custID>6</custID>
     <firstName>Mommy</firstName>
     <relationship>Mother</relationship>
  </Record>
</Records>

Obviously, distinguishing between these two in XPath is not really
difficult. But let's say there are 10 or 15 other pages about
Customers which need to be displayed, each with some nuanced
difference. I suppose I feared ending up with a tangled mess of
templates which are potentially trying to chomp each other's input due
to similarities. Maybe this problem is solved and indeed XPath will
suffice.

I'm open for comment on this one. I have other problems I'll bring up
in the context of other replies. Thanks.

sorry I have no idea what your peceived problem is, Your second example
wasn't well formed, but  assuming custID is formed it is structurally
identical to the first example.

So at that level your question seems to be, how, given two structurally
identical XMl fragments do I arrange them to be processed differently.

It's hard to answer that.

basically you must know (somehow) which processing you need to do in
each case, either you know from some external information, in which case
you can pass in that information as an external parameter to the
stylesheet, or the information is in some other part of the XML which
you haven't shown, in which case you can select it with Xpath.

In either case the logic would appear to be the same whether you are
using named templates or template matching.

> . But doesn't this circumvent the magical property of XSL to pick its
> own darn templates according to the data?

But you seem to be implying that the information is not in the data, so
no.

David

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