[xsl] Novice question: selecting an element based on an attribute id

[ohmson at netscape dot net (ohmson ampere)]

Dear list,
  I'm an novice user of XSLT but was tasked to transform an incoming XML file into another format. So far so good but I ran into a perplexing problem. Here's the short example of an incoming XML file:

    <object>
        <class  name="TestF">
            <field name="_str1" type="java.lang.String"/>
            <field name="_str3" type="java.lang.String"/>
        </class>
        <String field="_str1" myId="28"><![CDATA[a test of referencing.]]></String>
        <String field="_str3" myIdRef="28"/>
    </object>

  This needs to be transformed simply to

  </object>
        <_str1><![CDATA[a test of string referencing.]]></_str1>
        <_str3><![CDATA[a test of string referencing.]]></_str3>
    </object>

  As you can see, based on "myIdRef", I am supposed to retrieve the original string. In this example, the referent and the reference are close but sometimes in a big document, they could be far apart. I bet I can do this inefficiently by keeping state of all the referents in XSL variables but you folks probably have an better idea on how to do this efficiently.

 (Incidentally, the incoming XML file didn't use the ID and IDREF attributes because I was told that ID and IDREF cannot be a number).

Thanks much, Ohmson
-- 




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