Re: nested templates?

I remember early in the development process that nested templates were a
part of the test implementations, and in all honesty they didn't really add
much to the structure and were conceptually a pain to deal with. You can do
the same thing with a modal call:

<xsl:template match="foo">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="bar"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="foo" mode="bar">
    <!-- do boo.bar -->
</xsl:template>

and you gain the added benefit of still being reference the modal "bar" type
of foo from other templates. <xsl:for-each> can certainly be over-used
(badly) but again I think that what works best here is to teach people to
use for-each primarily as a context switcher. It does come into play more
often with node-sets, however; I have a message board system which orders a
list of messages in descending order prior to displaying a page of such
orders:
<xsl:variable name="orderedList">
    <xsl:for-each select="$messages">
         <xsl:sort select="date" order="descending"/>
        <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:variable>

Creating an entire template just to copy the contents of a list seemed
overkill here, so for-each worked fine.

-- Kurt Cagle



----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Bayes" <Chris@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2001 3:35 PM
Subject: RE:  nested templates?


>
> >But, hypothetically, what would be the difference between these
> >hypothetical nested-and-scoped templates, and the not-so-hypothetical
(but
> >often misapplied, and hence warned-against) xsl:for-each?
>
> Well probably not much really you can do anything with anything but I
guess
> it's just a view of the playing field. for-each restricts you to a one
> dimensional view of things unless you use it to change context (the
playing
> field you are on). But then you should call it something else. Team-bus
> comes to mind.
> I think nested templates could be quite powerful and a lot more logical.
>
> >I suppose it would be okay for beginners to use nested templates? :->
>
> Hey why not? But then they would be using them for different reasons than
> for-each
>
> I think it would make things a little less verbose and implementation
surely
> wouldn't be that difficult. Just a couple more levels on the stack.
>
> I dunno it just seems more logical for some situations. I haven't thought
it
> through though. It just struck me as  something that should be. I guess
> there is a reason why it wasn't allowed.
>
> Ciao Chris
>
> XML/XSL Portal
> http://www.bayes.co.uk/xml
>
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
>
>


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