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Re: Speeding up processing (with sablotron or saxon)

2004-07-13 10:49:47
Heyas Wendall,
Possible bug :)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wendell Piez" <wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
To: <xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2004 4:33 PM
Subject: Re: [xsl] Speeding up processing (with sablotron or saxon)


Hi Tony,

At 10:57 AM 7/13/2004, you wrote:

So I'd replace the:-
<xsl:for-each
select=".//resource[not(@swgcraft_id=preceding::*/@swgcraft_id)]">

with

<xsl:key name="resource-by-id" match="resource" use="@swgcraft_id"/>
<xsl:variable name="resources" select="//resource"/>
<xsl:variable name="unique-resources"

select="$resources[not(count(.|key('resources-by-id',@swgcraft_id)[1])
= 1)]"/>

but I guess I still need some form of for-each statement too?

Yeah, sorry I didn't wrap it up completely -- now you can have

<xsl:for-each select="$unique-resources">...</xsl:for-each>

...but it will be much more efficient, since the set has already been
collected -- the processor doesn't now have to look at every resource in
the document, checking all of their preceding siblings, to establish which
are unique.

This finding-the-unique-one business ("deduplicating") is one of the
relatively few common tasks -- maybe the most important -- for which XPath
1.0 has no direct provision, requiring us XSLT 1.0 hackers to master a
couple of tricky idioms.

Another way to do it you may have just seen in another thread. Instead of

<xsl:variable name="unique-resources"

select="$resources[not(count(.|key('resources-by-id',@swgcraft_id)[1])
= 1)]"/>

(Hey! isn't there a glitch here! isn't that 'not' erroneous? Oops ... I
think I should have offered
$resources[count(.|key('resources-by-id',@swgcraft_id)[1]) = 1]) ...)

you can have

<xsl:variable name="unique-resources"
      select="$resources[generate-id() =
generate-id(key('resources-by-id',@swgcraft_id)[1])]"/>

which does the same thing, but in a different way ... and because of the
way a string function is defined to work over a node set, can be obscured
further to simply

$resources[generate-id() =
generate-id(key('resources-by-id',@swgcraft_id))]

Cheers,
Wendell

using these snippets of code results in nothing coming out of Saxon, and
"Warning: Sablotron error on line 8: XSL element 'key' can only be used at
the top level" error with Sablotron

first bit of code looking like this now

....
<xsl:template match="server" />
<xsl:template match="server[(_at_)name='Ahazi']">
<resources>
<xsl:key name="resource-by-id" match="resource" use="@swgcraft_id"/>
<xsl:variable name="resources" select="//resource"/>
<xsl:variable name="unique-resources" select="$resources[generate-id() =
generate-id(key('resources-by-id',@swgcraft_id))]"/>
<xsl:for-each select="$unique-resources">
<xsl:sort select="."/>
<resource>
<xsl:attribute name="swgcraft_id" >
<xsl:value-of select="./@swgcraft_id"/>
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:copy-of select="name"/>
<xsl:copy-of select="type"/> etc....

I've tried it with each version of <xsl:variable name="unique-resources"
select="$resources.../> you've supplied and they all have the same error.

Tony