Re: XPath shorthand

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 6:12 PM, Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 21 August 2012 17:49, Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I'm assuming/hoping that the positional predicate in the match pattern
>> will curtail the search when the key is being indexed since all I want
>> is a list of element names.
> ...
>>> In the end I went with
>>>
>>> <xsl:key name="desired_fields"
>>> match="m__id[1]|m__name[1]|m__path[1]|m__enabled[1]"
>>> use="local-name()"/>
>>>
>>> and
>>>
>>> following-sibling::*[key('desired_fields',local-name())]
>
> Why do that?
>

Because then all my end-user has to do if he wants to change the
fields being retrieved is add (or subtract) the relevant element name
from the match pattern.

With the other options I have to maintain (and therefore edit) the
list of desired element names in two places (one to control what
templates are applied and one for the following sibling check).

I understand it may not be as performant, but the volumes are not
significant  and the usability feature mentioned is more important.

I amended the match keys so they read match="/descendant::m__id[1] as
my previous effort may have found the first occurrence in every node
set rather than the first in the whole document.