Confused: How to select XML content via ID in XSL

Question

My aim is to use my xml (version 1.0) and xsl (version 1.0) files to create html pages.

This is the code in my XML file:

<Photo>
<Text id="one">This is the first Photo</Text>
<Image id="one" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/ngpc112812/s_n01_nursingm.jpg" /> </Photo>
<Photo>
<Text id="run">This is the run picture/Text>
<Image id="run" src="http://www.krav-maga.org.uk/uploads/images/news/running.jpg" /> </Photo>

I am trying to select individual pieces of my XML document by using their ID. I would also do this with other text or paragraphs which' I will give an ID, too. At the moment I am using a for-each function to present all images at once, but I don' know how I exactly I could select individual files. I was thinking about something like this:

<xsl:value-of select="Photo/Text[one]"/>
<img> 
<xsl:attribute name="src" id="one">
 <xsl:value-of select="Photo/Image/@src"/>
 </xsl:attribute> 
</img>

and

<xsl:value-of select="Photo/Text[run]"/>
<img> 
<xsl:attribute name="src" id="run"> 
<xsl:value-of select="Photo/Image/@src"/> 
</xsl:attribute> 
</img>

But it doesn't work:( I tried what I can but I am lost. Could you help me?

Tim C Tim C · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-11T18:21:52

The syntax you are looking for is this

<xsl:value-of select="Photo/Text[@id='one']" />

And this

<xsl:value-of select="Photo/Image[@id='one']/@src" />

However, you probably don't want to repeat this coding for every single possible @id you may have. It would be easy to use template matching here, and simply select the photo elements and process them with a single shared template. Here is a sample XSLT would shows this is done

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
   <xsl:output method="html" indent="yes"/>

   <xsl:template match="/*">
      <xsl:apply-templates select="Photo" />
   </xsl:template>

   <xsl:template match="Photo">
      <xsl:value-of select="Text" />
      <img src="{Image/@src}" />
   </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This would output the following

This is the first Photo
<img src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/ngpc112812/s_n01_nursingm.jpg">
This is the run picture
<img src="http://www.krav-maga.org.uk/uploads/images/news/running.jpg">

Also note the use of "Attribute Value Templates" in creating the src attribute for the image, which makes the XSLT neater to write.

Confused: How to select XML content via ID in XSL

1 Answers