problem solved with your help

Dear List member and especially Jeni Tennison,

although I always seemed to ask unaswerable questions or to you it seemed
locically incorrect what I was trying to do, with you tips I
managed to create my generic xslt stylesheet for my Java XML Wrapper:

By setting the two variables and the test condition 2 times I can submit
sensible queries to all kinds of different xml sources.
If you are interested try out Xalan with the SigmodRecords from Uni Roma
(www.dia.uniroma3.it/Araneus/Sigmod/Record/SigmodRecord/SigmodRecord.xml)
as source an my xslt:
Only change the 3 customizing points.
As I can never be sure if somebody is searching for an element or attribute
I always check both.
And even if performance is not so good with .// I must do this, because my
input doc don't have an DTD or schema essentially AND I don't want
the person who registers an XML source with my wrapper to give such detailed
path information.

########### The generic customizable stylesheet

<xsl:transform version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="xml"/>

  <!-- my java program should only set those values to customize the
stylesheet //-->
  <xsl:variable name="entity">article</xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="essentialtree">issue</xsl:variable>

  <!-- not elsewhere specified patterns are directly copied //-->
  <xsl:template match="node() | @*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node() | @*"/>
 </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <!-- also output super tree that is also wanted//-->
  <xsl:template match="node()[name()=$essentialtree]">
 <xsl:if test=".//node()[name()=$entity][(contains(.//title, 'Database') or
contains(.//@title, 'Database')) and (.//author='C. J. Date' or
.//@author='C. J. Date')]">
   <xsl:copy>
   <xsl:apply-templates/>
   </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>

  <!-- output the entities with the properties that fullfil the query//-->
  <xsl:template match="node()[name()=$entity]">
 <xsl:if test="self::node()[(contains(.//title, 'Database') or
contains(.//@title, 'Database')) and (.//author='C. J. Date' or
.//@author='C. J. Date')]">
 <xsl:copy>
   <xsl:copy-of select="*"/>
 </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:transform>

########## An example XMLSourceDescriptor

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<XMLSourceDescriptor>

 <!-- description that could be shown to explain the resultset //-->
 <description>
     Database of all articles in their issues
 </description>

 <!-- location of the original source XML document described by this, and
various backup url //-->
 <locations>
   <url
position="00">http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/Araneus/Sigmod/Record/SigmodRecord/
SigmodRecord.xml</url>
 </locations>

 <!-- description of the searchable field in the source //-->
 <properties>
    <property name="author" mapto="dc.creator" outputcontainer="article">
    <!-- property description goes here but not mandatory  //-->
    article's author (may be only coauthor)
  </property>
  <property name="title" mapto="dc:title" outputcontainer="article"/>
  <property name="number" mapto="dc:date" outputcontainer="issue">
     the monthly number of an ACM issue within a certain volume
  </property>
 </properties>

</XMLSourceDescriptor>

##### An suitable common query coming generated from the users input

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE query SYSTEM "dtd/cqml.dtd">

<query>
    <boolean op="and">
      <term value="C. J. Date"
            field="dc:creator"
            relation="eq"/>
      <term value="Database"
            field="dc:title"
            relation="eq"
            truncation="both"/>
    </boolean>
</query>

............................................................................
..........
 ROBERT SÖSEMANN  (robert.soesemann@xxxxxx)

 schwärzlocherstr. 29/1 | 72070 tübingen
 tel : 07071 / 400 880

 icq# : 100 467 870
 pgp-keys : www.webspace-journey.de/pgp.asc
............................................................................
..........



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