Re: Side-effects, state, internal references

Sorry for such a late followup to this thread.  One problem I am having
caused by not being able to use "global" state in XSL (although using it
a
little guiltily in msxsl) is not related to output element counting but
something even simplier:

We have an XML tree which we need to make available to "legacy" systems,
which want to import it into Excel, etc in comma delimited format.
Using
XSL to produce this is fine except for coping with "repeating groups"
where the "child" lines need to have information from the parent.

Eg, an employee may have multiple deductions.  For ease of procesing in
the Excel environment, the imported file looks something like

E,10156,"W Smith", ...  ["E" is a rec type, 10156 is emp#]
D,10156,101.45,"Health insurance",.. [D = deduction
D,10156,98.55,"Union dues",...        10156 is emp#
E,10233,"F Jones",...
D,...etc

With XSL we *can* go up the XML tree to get the employee element and get
the emp#, but having to do this on every sub-element is expensive,
whereas
setting a "current global employee #" and using it when outputting the
child records is simple and fast.

Kent Fitch                           Ph: +61 2 6276 6711
ITS  CSIRO  Canberra  Australia      kent.fitch@xxxxxxxxxxxx


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