[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: trouble with preceding axis
Hi Duane, Just thought I'd offer some advice that is similar to what Michael Kay already mentioned but thought I might elaborate a bit on. Given > <root> > <apple/> > <pear/> > <orange/> > </root> > > Given an xpath to orange (/root/orange) I want to reference the > previous element which is a peer. The peer is a pear, very true ;). Back to the advice: >I tried the following with no > success: > > /root/preceding::orange Of course not, this doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense. Imagine every XPath to be similar to a directory path, only more complex. What does /root/../../ get you? Something that doesn't really exist. Now imagine a system that would allow you to get the "next" directory/file in a list. so say root has four files: baseball, cricket, dance, and Zamboni_Racing. You could get the previous file by previous::filename, or get all previous files by using previous::*. So you could do /root/dance/previous::baseball, or /root/Zamboni_Racing/previous::*. In XPath, this is preceding, but that's actually more complicated. (preceding-sibiling is closer to what I described here.) Your XPath is looking for all the element nodes that are orange that occur before root, not the previous node before orange. Others have mentioned the workaround for that. One other observation, it can be complicated to use a lot of full paths. Not always, but usually it indicates some issues with having too much pull. Instead, you could have something like: <xsl:template match="orange"> <xsl:for-each select="preceding-sibling::*[1]"> do some stuff </xsl:for-each> </xsl:template> As always, I've made some simplications, but hopefully it might help you read the XPaths a little better. Jon Gorman
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|