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Re: best-technique for selective group and merge?

2004-03-02 12:29:34
At 12:44 PM 3/2/2004, Ken wrote:
At 2004-03-02 08:43 -0800, James A. Robinson wrote:
The feature can contain multiple configs,
each of which I want to merge across features:
...
I want to be able to select /config_datastore/site/* and perform selective
grouping (on feature @name) and merging (on the feature/config elements)
to return:
...

I found I could wrap my head around this problem using variables instead of keys. An example is below giving your desired results. Note how I take advantage of the node-set comparison of a single value to a set of values to get from all configs only those whose feature's name is in a set of names.

I like this solution. What had occurred to me is to key directly to parameters, using a compound key value of its configuration id as well as feature name. But I think Ken's solution is cleaner and more elegant.

It's a case where variable-based grouping such as Ken demonstrates from time to time on the list has advantages over key-based grouping. Maybe we think of key-based grouping (or Muenchian document-scoped solutions in general) because we've gotten used to that pattern, and haven't quite internalized the other approach. But I'm making it a point to study the variable-based solutions when I see them, since this bias (at least on my part) almost undoubtedly comes from the natural inclination to do what I know works despite its being more cumbersome and difficult than a less-familiar alternative, even when that alternative is both cleaner, and arguably closer to the "spirit" of XSLT.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            
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