My immediate answer to the question in your subject line is "use variables".
Now I see:
I want to get all other "Value" items, having the same
id. I want to
get them without using a referenc variable.
and my immediate reaction is: why? It's like saying you want to eat
spaghetti, and you want to do it without using a fork.
I tried:
<xsl:for-each select="//Value[(_at_)id = Value/@id]">
<!-- Do something -->
</xsl:for-each>
But this returned all Values having a attribut "id".
I'm surprised this would return anything. It asks for all Value elements
that have an @id attribute and that have a child Value element with the same
value of @id.
If I declare a variable with the value of "id"
<xsl:variable name="v_id">
<xsl:value-of select="@id"/>
</xsl:variable>
It's better to write this as
<xsl:variable name="v_id" select="@id"/>
but in this case either will work.
and process though the other nodes by using the variable it works:
<xsl:for-each select="//Value[(_at_)id = $v_id]">
<!-- Do something -->
</xsl:for-each>
In this case I get all "Value" nodes having a "id" of "123".
But how can I do this without using a variable?
If you really hate variables that much, you can often get by with current(),
which is in effect a built-in variable set to the node that was the current
node at the outermost level of the XPath expression. So you can write
<xsl:for-each select="//Value[(_at_)id = current()/@id]">
Incidentally, this would be much faster with keys.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/