XSLT

Name

generate-id() Function — Generates a unique ID (an XML name) for a given node. If no node-set is given, generate-id() generates an ID for the context node.

Synopsis

string generate-id(
               node-set?
               )

Inputs

An optional node-set. If no node-set is given, this function generates an ID for the context node. If the node-set is empty, generate-id() returns an empty string.

Output

A unique ID, or an empty string if an empty node-set is given. Several things about the generate-id() function are important to know:

• For a given transformation, every time you invoke generate-id() against a given node, the XSLT processor must return the same ID. The ID can’t change while you’re doing a transformation. If you ask the XSLT processor to transform your document with this stylesheet tomorrow, there’s no guarantee that generate-id() will generate the same ID the second time around. All of tomorrow’s calls to generate-id() will generate the same ID, but that ID might not be the one generated today.

• The generate-id() function is not required to check if its generated ID duplicates an ID that’s already in the document. In other words, if an element in your document has an attribute of type ID with the value sdk3829a, there’s a remote possibility that an ID returned by generate-id() would have the value sdk3829a. It’s not likely, but it could happen.

• If you invoke generate-id() against two different nodes, the two generated IDs must be different.

• Given a node-set, generate-id() returns an ID for the node in ...