RE: Lookup kind of Functionality with XSL

> I have a requirement like this.
> 
> <employee hireDate="09/01/1998">
>     <COLUMN NAME="LAST">Herbert three</COLUMN>
>     <COLUMN NAME="FIRST">Johnny</COLUMN>
>     <COLUMN NAME="ANL_RATE"><![CDATA[26525.8500]]></COLUMN>
>     <COLUMN NAME="STATUS"><![CDATA[A]]></COLUMN>
>   </employee>
> 
> another piece of XML is
> <DESC_TABLE>
> <COLUMN NAME="STATUS"><![CDATA[A]]></COLUMN>
> <COLUMN NAME="DESCR"><![CDATA[Active]]></COLUMN>
> </ROW>
> </DESC_TABLE>
> 
> 
> while reading STATUS (status A), I need to look up the 
> corresponding Description ('Active').

Assuming that the <employee> element is bound to variable $emp, and the
<DESC_TABLE> element to variable $table, and that there is a <ROW> start tag
carelessly omitted from the sample XML, you want

$table/ROW[COLUMN[@name='DESCR'][.=$emp/COLUMN[@name='STATUS']]/COLUMN[@NAME
='DESCR']

As I suggested in a response to a previous post, this would all become a lot
easier if you first transform this verbose representation of your data into
something cleaner, like

<statusCodes>
  <status code="A" description="Active"/>
  ...
</statusCodes>

so the logic would become

$statusCodes/status[@code=$emp/status]/@description

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay