Brent,
The only hard part of what you're describing is the "randomly" part.
XSLT by itself provides no random or pseudo-random number generation.
I am not exactly sure if you really meant displaying these articles
randomly if you want articles appearing more often than the rest.
You can get around this, or through it, by:
* calling out to your environment, e.g. with an extension function,
to get a random number
If you want to, say generate something like have certain articles
print out more often than the others, for the function part, you can use
<xsl:function name="functx:dateTime" as="xs:dateTime"
xmlns:functx="http://www.functx.com"; >
<xsl:param name="hour" as="xs:anyAtomicType"/>
<xsl:param name="minute" as="xs:anyAtomicType"/>
<xsl:param name="second" as="xs:anyAtomicType"/>
<xsl:sequence select="
xs:dateTime(
concat(functx:time($hour,$minute,$second)))
"/>
</xsl:function>
to get what you might want to do. This preserves the minute, second and
hour that you could customize into your <xsl:if> statements. You can
actually then control the variables and have those that are certain
numbers to do certain things.
* passing in a random or virtually-random number as a parameter, and
using that
* using FXSL, which provides support for generating pseudo-random
numbers (this requires
invoking FXSL libraries)
* other possibilities I may be neglecting
Which of these is best will depend on externals, such as which
processor you're using, whether an extension function or (say) FXSL
is more feasible for you, and so forth.
Lick that problem and the rest is straightforward, as XSLT can handle
the weighting part of it (providing, of course, the weights are
available as source data).
For FXSL on this, see
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/articles/Random/Casting%20the%20Dice%20with%20FXSL-htm.htm.
Cheers,
Wendell
At 02:34 PM 1/10/2008, you wrote:
Hi,
I have an RSS feed that I use to display articles on
my website. I would like to randomly display one
article at a time, but I want to be able to
artificially weight the articles so that article 1
comes up %50 of the time, article 2 comes up 25% of
the time, etc.
Is this something that XSL is capable of doing?
Please and thank you.
Brent Wilcox
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MIS 2008
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