RE: [xsl] newbie: xsl:key and summation of substrings

["Michael Kay" <michael dot h dot kay at ntlworld dot com>]

> As said, I am a newbie. As a result, your well-intended
> response is too
> general to be useful. Thanks all the same.
>
> I agree, simple stuff like this should be in an appendix to
> the spec for
> all to see.
> I am wasting mega cycles on this baisc point.
>
> It seems to me that lack of useful examples seduces people onto
> constructing proprietary XSLT extensions, weakening the language as a
> standard.
> I am interested in a 100% XLST 1.0 solution .

The only 100% portable solution is to use a recursive named template. An
example of how to do this is on page 535 of my XSLT Programmer's Reference
(Wrox Press) 2nd edition.

Dimitre's suggestion was that instead of writing your own recursive
template, you re-use a general-purpose one that he has made available
(written in standard XSLT). Because his solution was designed to be general
purpose, it uses some rather advanced techniques which are indeed 100%
portable, but it may not be obvious to a beginner quite how they work.

The reason people have constructed proprietary extension functions to XSLT
is not for lack of examples, it is because some things are just difficult to
do within standard XSLT 1.0. It is, after all, only version 1.0.

Mike Kay




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