Dear Karen,
At 02:06 PM 6/21/2006, you wrote:
In your following example:
<xsl:template match="foo">
<br/>
</xsl:template>
A <br> will show up every time there is a "foo" tag, but the
decendants of "foo" won't be traversed. Is this correct?
Yes, exactly right.
Then
according to your following rule #3, when you have a template that
matches a node (say node A), no matter whether there is
apply-template, this node A would be traversed or applied this
template anyway, but not its decendant, right?
Node A will be matched only if it is selected for processing. This
typically happens because its parent has been matched by a template
that contains an apply-templates instruction, and it has been
selected there. Remember that this will happen to A's parent even if
there is no template for it, since in that case it will be matched by
the built-in rule,
<xsl:template match="*">
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
Sorry that my questions may be too naive, but all your replies did
help me a lot, I feel I'm closer and closer to the goal..... :-)
Actually it's not that the questions are naive. Everyone starts at
the beginning; smart learners often stay there awhile, getting the
foundations right. It's just frustrating because while apparently you
really need a working stylesheet pronto, and so we'd like to help
with that, we can also tell that without a firm grasp of *why* things
are happening, you'll continue to have the same questions of how to
fix them. (We see this all the time on the list, which makes it
worse.) In other words: you can't afford to start from the beginning,
but are rushing straight into the middle. Experience shows that such
a course takes longer than starting from the start.
1. Applying templates does *not* happen just because a template is present
2. Nevertheless, since the built-in default templates (for elements
and the root) contain apply-templates instructions, the tree will be
traversed completely by default in any case.
3. Yet, this default behavior is easy to override, at any level of
the tree, simply by writing a template that does not contain an
apply-templates instruction. This is an important, and very useful,
feature of the language.
Having the instruction be explicit also allows us to:
1. Do it more than once
2. Apply templates to any nodes we like (not just the children)
For your point #2, if I'd like to apply this template to its children
and other nodes, how do I do this? I guess I need to give it a name
and let other nodes call this template, right? Then use apply-template
to its children, right? If I'm right, then can <xsl:template name =
"foo" match = "foo1"> be right?
In the general case, we simply allow the processor to match elements
one level at a time, by selecting children and matching them with
templates that apply templates to their own children, etc.
Occasionally it's useful to jump from a node down deeper than its
children, but again since the default rule says to apply templates to
children, any grandchildren or deeper will be processed eventually
even without jumping to them explicitly.
If you have a template that needs to match more than one kind of
node, that's easy; we just write a match pattern accordingly:
<xsl:template match="a | b | c">...</xsl:template>
(This will match any node that could be found in a set of nodes "a |
b | c", that is any a, b, or c.)
Note that a, b and c do *not* have to be siblings. Try this:
input:
<doc>
<title>My test document</title>
<p>My paragraph.</p>
<sec>
<title>My subsection</title>
<p>Hierarchies can be very useful.</p>
</sec>
</doc>
stylesheet (no other templates):
<xsl:template match="doc | title | p | sec">
<div class="{name()}">
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</div>
</xsl:template>
and see what comes out.
The ease of doing exactly this sort of thing is why XSLT is so powerful.
As for your suggestion, it's true that a template can have both a
name and a match, and this is sometimes useful; but it's also
somewhat rare to actually need such a construction and I'd be
surprised if you did.
Cheers,
Wendell
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