Name

<xsl:choose> — The <xsl:choose> element is XSLT’s version of the switch or case statement found in many procedural programming languages.

Category

Instruction

Required Attributes

None.

Optional Attributes

None.

Content

Contains one or more <xsl:when> elements and might contain a single <xsl:otherwise> element. Any <xsl:otherwise> elements must be the last element inside <xsl:choose>.

Appears in

<xsl:choose> appears inside a template.

Defined in

XSLT section 9.2, Conditional Processing with xsl:choose.

Example

Here’s an example that uses <xsl:choose> to select the background color for the rows of an HTML table. We cycle among four different values, using <xsl:choose> to determine the value of the bgcolor attribute in the generated HTML document. Here’s the XML document we’ll use:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<list xml:lang="en">
  <title>Albums I've bought recently:</title>
  <listitem>The Sacred Art of Dub</listitem>
  <listitem>Only the Poor Man Feel It</listitem>
  <listitem>Excitable Boy</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="sw">Aki Special</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="en-gb">Combat Rock</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="zu">Talking Timbuktu</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="jz">The Birth of the Cool</listitem>
</list>

And here’s our stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="html"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <html> <head> <title> <xsl:value-of select="list/title"/> </title> </head> <body> <h1><xsl:value-of select="list/title"/></h1> ...

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