Hi,
I maintain a Web directory of fundraising software hosted on IIS
(www.tfraise.com/listings.aspx) and cannot figure how to get
my listings to
be rendered unsorted or, more to the point, sorted in a
random manner each
time the page is requested. I do not want to give
vendors/software with
names starting with the latter A a constant top ranking because of
alphabetical sorting, but give every vendor/software an equal
chance at
first user request. Is this really complicated to do? I had a
hard time
getting it to work as well as it is now.
You can either use Dimitre's FXSL <http://www.topxml.com/xsl/articles/dice/> to
generate the random sequence, or generate the random sequence outside XSLT
processing and pass that in as a parameter. You can then use xsl:sort to sort
the nodes based on the random sequence and position(), or you can write a
recursive template that goes throught the sequence and processes a node in that
position. If you don't know the number of vendors beforehand, you might want to
first count them, then generate the random sequence of the corret size, and
finally sort them.
Cheers,
Jarno - Hocico: Odio En El Alma