Re: possible bug in p:iteration select

Florent,

On 1 Oct 2008, at 12:50, Florent Georges wrote:
>  If I am right, I've seen in another context that same
> thing (quoting an XPath expression itself to pass it to a
> step), but I can't find it anymore.  Something like:
>
>    xpath=" '/root/elem[@a eq 1]' "
>
>  Of course, defining an attribute's value as an XPath
> expression, thus having to quote string literals in that
> context, is not at all disturbing (IMHO.)


There are some steps that take XPaths or XSLT patterns as options. For  
example, p:string-replace has two options: match is an XSLT match  
pattern and replace is an XPath expression. So you can do something  
like:

<p:string-replace match="/a/b[@c = 1]"
                   replace="@d" />

which would replace the values of the <b> elements whose 'c' attribute  
was '1' with the values of their 'd' attribute.

Now if you use <p:with-option>, the values of the 'match' and  
'replace' options are set using an XPath expression. The options are  
set to strings that happen to be XSLT match patterns and XPath  
expressions. So you'd have to use the quotes around them:

<p:string-replace>
   <p:with-option name="match" select="'/a/b[@c = 1]'" />
   <p:with-option name="replace" select="'@d'" />
</p:string-replace>

I agree that this looks insane, and when people are learning XProc  
they are going to forget the quotes, just like people forget to put  
quotes around strings when they set variables with the select  
attribute. I've lost count of the number of times I've written:

   <xsl:variable name="lowercase" select="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" />

But (a) if you want to set the option to a static string, you will  
want to use the shorthand notation anyway and (b) this allows you to  
set the value of the match and replace options based on information  
that you find within an XML document. Say that you had a configuration  
document like:

   <config>
     <elements>/a/b[@c = 1]</elements>
     <attribute>@d</attribute>
   </config>

You could use this document to configure your XProc pipeline, by doing:

<p:string-replace>
   <p:with-option name="match" select="/config/elements">
     <p:document href="config.xml" />
   </p:with-option>
   <p:with-option name="replace" select="/config/attribute">
     <p:document href="config.xml" />
   </p:with-option>
</p:string-replace>

In this scenario, the match option is set to an XSLT match pattern,  
and the XSLT match pattern comes from the config document. Locating  
the XSLT match pattern from the config document is done with an XPath  
expression. Similarly, the replace option is set to an XPath  
expression by selecting the XPath expression from the config document,  
using an XPath expression!

See, it all makes absolute sense ;)

Jeni
-- 
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com

Received on Wednesday, 1 October 2008 16:55:42 UTC