that actually seems to have worked!!

But i thought that an xpath like SubSection[*[@filter='filter1']] is read as, a SubSection element that contains any children having a filter attribute equal to 'filter1'. I thought that's what this did and thought it would have caught my text.

I guess i'm misunderstanding the extent of a child element?

Russ 
On 07/09/12, Markus Abt<abt@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
 
russurquhart1@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> The third template i think should work, but isn't completely. This template should return any remaining SubSection elements, and all that are left at this time, i would think, would be those that have no NDA content.

No, for example if you have three SubSections:
SubSection/SubSection/SubSection[@filter='filter1']

The first (outmost) one matches template 3 (public-only).
The second (middle) one matches template 2 (neither NDA-only nor public-only).
The third (inner) one matches template 1 (NDA-only).

I guess that is not what you want. Propably, you want to change the pattern of template 2 to:
SubSection[descendant::*[@filter='filter1']]

But that is only my guess since your input XML is also not public...

Regards,
Markus