I fear this may be a FAQ...
Not yet F (not enough people using 2) but it will be...
<xsl:variable name="foo" as="xs:string">
<xsl:text/>abc<xsl:value-of select="'def'"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="$foo"/>
Gives the error message: "A sequence of more than one item is not
allowed as the value of item $foo"
This is because variable $foo contains two strings,
beware of the difference between a text node and a string.
The content of your variable constructs a sequence of two text nodes.
It then tries to cast these to a string as that's what you specified in
the as attribute and that fails.
This would work:
<xsl:variable name="foo" as="xs:string">
<xsl:value-of>abc<xsl:value-of select="'def'"/></xsl:value-of>
</xsl:variable>
yet I've defined it
as type xs:string - which it seems refers to a single string. If I
define it as xs:string+ I get the separator and then need to use
string-join().
Yes
If I drop the as="xs:string" attribute I get the desired result 'abcdef'
- but this is because that's the string value of the nodeset.
there are no nodesets any more. Without the as attribute you generate a
(sequence of one) document node and as the text nodes are placed as
children of this document node they are merged into a single text node
as you can't have adjacent text nodes. This document node is then cast
to a string, as you say.
This is very upside down for me.
Life's like that.
Is it really the case that we will have to be very aware of how many
items we are creating
Welcome to the wonderful world of strict type checking:-)
Often as not the only reason for using an as attribute is to generate an
error on code that would otherwise work as you want to trap user-errors
earlier rather than rely on implicit conversions. So if you say
as="xs:string" you are saying that you want exactly one string, so if
you give it a sequence of two things you error. This is either a good
thing or a bad thing, depending on whether, at heart, you are a lisp
programmer or a pascal one:-)
and construct large concat()'s, or have a liberal
sprinking string-join()'s throughout the stylesheet? Or am I missing
something and I shouldn't be using the type xs:string in this way?
cheers
andrew
David
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