problems with xslt on "open" catalog-formats like ecXML oder xCBL

Hello,

I am dealing with a product catalog delivered in the xml-standard ecXML 3.0
from Requisite. From this product catalog i want to create a dynamic
web-navigation with to select our different products with a web-client.
One specific item on that xml-format is, that using that xml-format you can
design your own structure for your catalog. to achieve this, the attributes
for a product are not fix xml-elements, which are declared in a dtd or
schema-file. all "own" attributes are stored in key/value elements to a
product.

for example

<!-- A new Product comes with an ITEM-Element-Tag and the action attribute
holds the action to do for that product -->
<ITEM action = "ADD">
        <KEYVALUE>
                <KEY>
                        Suplier Name
                </KEY>
                <VALUE>
                        abc enterprises
                </VALUE>
        </KEYVALUE>
        <KEYVALUE>
                <KEY>
                        Suplier Number
                </KEY>
                <VALUE>
                        123
                </VALUE>
        </KEYVALUE>
        <KEYVALUE>
                <KEY>
                        PartNum
                </KEY>
                <VALUE>
                        4711
                </VALUE>
        </KEYVALUE>
        <KEYVALUE>
                <KEY>
                        length
                </KEY>
                <VALUE>
                        100
                </VALUE>
        </KEYVALUE>
        <KEYVALUE>
                <KEY>
                        price
                </KEY>
                <VALUE>
                        123.45
                </VALUE>
        </KEYVALUE>

This brings some difficulties when making a selection on the product catalog
with xslt
When i want to get the prices for all products with a length of 100 i CAN'T
make an XPATH /XLST like this

        <xsl:for-each select="//ITEM[length=100]">
                the price for <xsl:value-of select="partnum"/> is
<xsl:value-of select="price"/>
        <xsl:for-each>

because there are not length-attribute and partnum or price elements. 

my actual way is:

        <xsl:for-each
select="//ITEM/KEYVALUE/KEY[text()='length']/following-sibling::*[text()='10
0']/../..">
                the price for <xsl:value-of
select="KEYVALUE/KEY[text()='partnum']/following-sibling::*"/> is
<xsl:value-of select="KEYVALUE/KEY[text()='price']/following-sibling::*"/>
        <xsl:for-each>

MY QUESTIONS now are:

a) is there a more elegant way to select product-items based on the values
of specific product-attributes defined in the KEYVALUE/KEY and
KEYVALUE/VALUE strucutres. it works but gets more complex when there is more
than one search-condition for the selection

b) i want to sort the product-items in that for-loop based on the values. So
i want to sort the products with length of 100 on their price-value.
I didn't found a working <xsl:sort> selection for it.

regards
matthias hayk





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