You could also of course just write a template directly that iterates
along a parameter containing the node set, and passing on a parameter
with the largest value so far.
Any of these solutions is likely to just have to make one pass over the
data to fond the largest so will have time proportional to the n if
there are n nodes to be accessed.
using xsl:sort and taking the first requires less keystrokes to code in
xslt but will always take longer given a large enough data set (unless
you have a very smart query optimiser) as you first sort all the nodes
into a complete order and then ignore most of that information and just
take the first. You can not sort a list of values in order n time, most
likely it takes n log n.
This is so.
Interestingly, I have not been able to construct an example (regardles of
the length of the node-set) when the xsl:sort - based algorithm is actually
slower than the linear solutions.
O(N) and O(log(N) * N) both have a some coefficient at the front --
obviously the one for the liner solutions is quite big.
=====
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list