Re: Identifier attribute (was: Re: Creating Hie

<xsl:template match="node()">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="mark-id"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="a | b | c | d" mode="mark-id">
  <!-- match any elements you want to mark with an id -->
  <xsl:attribute name="id">
    <xsl:number count="a | b | c | d" level="any"/>
  </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="*" mode="mark-id"/>
<!-- matching other elements in the 'mark-id' mode does nothing -->

I hope that helps,
Wendell

Thanks for all your comments. The XML file I need to create was designed by someone else and is interpreted by code which don't have access to. It has attributes with the name "id" and increasing integer values, so this is what I have to generate. I guess these don't use the id semantics. Using <xsl:number/> as suggested by Ken works fine in this particular case, and is very much easier than what I was trying to find a way of doing, which was rather than using the sequence number of the nodes in the input file, to work out how many nodes had been generated in the output file.

If there was no direct correspondence between the number of elements in the input file and the number in the output file (as may become the case with some enhancements that I'm planning), how would I calculate a value of this sort (let's call it a sequence value rather than an id to avoid the confusion)? E.g. if my output file needs to look something like the following, where all the a, b, c and d elements need to have an "id" (sequence) attribute with a steadily incrementing value through the file. There can be all sorts of other nodes (e and f in the example) at various levels in the tree which do not need id/sequence attributes. In this particular system the a elements can be nested to any depth, but there can be only one level of b, c and d elements within each sub-tree, but that's just the way this particular system works.

How would I generate these id/sequence values, either as a second pass, or as part of the first pass which generates this structure from the non-hierarchical source file?
<root>
<a id="1">
<b id="2">
<e/>
</b>
<b id="3">
<c id="4"/>
</b>
<b id="5">
<c id="6">
<d id="7">
<e/>
</d>
<d id="8"/>
</c>
<c id="9">
<d id="10">
<e/>
<f/>
</d>
<d id="11"/>
</c>
</b>
</a>
<a id="12">
<a id="13"/>
<a id="14">
<b id="15"/>
</a>
</a>
</root>

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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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