Re: XSLT Hello World - outreach

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 10:02 PM, Brian Chrisman <brchrisman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> Okay... is it me, or is this one of those exceedingly rare cases where
> you actually want the 'A!=B' test instead of 'not(A=B)'?
> ie, test="*[1]/@audience!=*/@audience" would tell us when something in
> this case is 'not' to be promoted?
>
> - Brian

It is true that the expression you wrote would do the job, so long as
there is at least one child element with an @audience attribute
(comparisons are false if either sequence is empty).

 But I expect most people would prefer
boolean(count(distinct-values(*/@audience)) = 1)

Note that in some other instance---in particular if you had to do
something with the nodes in each case [do one thing if all @audience
are the same, and do something else if they are different], you might
prefer <xsl:for-each-group select="*" group-by="@audience"> This would
allow you to count how many distinct groups you had (by calling
last()) and have the nodes already divvied up for processing.

-David


-- 

"A false conclusion, once arrived at and widely accepted is not
dislodged easily, and the less it is understood, the more tenaciously
it is held." - Cantor's Law of Preservation of Ignorance.