September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
712 pages
24h 45m
English
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Attribute Location Steps
Attributes are also addressable by XPath. To select a particular
attribute of an element, use an @
sign followed by the name of the attribute you want.
For example, the XPath expression @born selects the born attribute of the context node. Example 9-3 is a simple XSLT
stylesheet that generates an HTML table of names and birth and death
dates from documents like Example
9-1.
Example 9-3. An XSLT stylesheet that uses root element, child element,
and attribute location steps
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<xsl:apply-templates select="people"/>
</html>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="people">
<table>
<xsl:apply-templates select="person"/>
</table>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="person">
<tr>
<td><xsl:value-of select="name"/></td>
<td><xsl:value-of select="@born"/></td>
<td><xsl:value-of select="@died"/></td>
</tr>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>The stylesheet in Example
9-3 has three template rules. The first template rule has a
match pattern that matches the root node, /. The XSLT processor activates this
template rule and sets the context node to the root node. Then it
outputs the start-tag <html>. This is followed by an
xsl:apply-templates element that
selects nodes matching the XPath expression people. If the input document is Example 9-1, then there is exactly one such node, the root element. This is selected and its template rule, the one ...