Understanding The For-each Element In XSLT

Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is an XML technology which is used to transform XML data. XML file can be used to set the ground-rules for a given body of data and to describe the data itself. XSL allows us to take that input XML data and convert it into information which can be displayed in a web browser window or opened with a text editor. It can also be used to create an XML file which is a modified version of an input XML file.

When displaying elements in a browser window, the XSL elements which allow us to loop through an XML tree and carry out decision-making really come into their own. One of the key methods used in XSL for looping through all occurrences of a given XML element is the \”For-each\” element. This uses the \”select\” attribute to specify which XML element is to be used in the loop. The \”For-each\” element uses both an opening and a closing tag and any lines of code placed between the opening and closing tags will be repeated each time the element specified in the \”select\” attribute is encountered in the XML file.

For example, let\’s say we have an XML file containing a list of companies and the addresses of their websites. Let\’s also say that the element which we will be targeting in the XSL \”For-each\” statement is called \”company\” and that, within each company element, we have a \”name\”, \”telephone\” and \”website\” element. Before beginning our \”For-each\” loop, we could place the opening tag of an HTML \”ul\” element (an unordered or bulleted list).

Inside the \”For-each\” loop, we could then output an HTML \”li\” element and, between the opening and closing \”li\” tags, output the contents of the \”name\” and \”telephone\” elements from the XML file. The data in the \”website\” could then be used to convert the \”name\” into a clickable link.

As for the appearance of the data in the resulting HTML output, this would be controlled by a linked CSS file. CSS can be used to format the output in any way we like, so our bulleted list can take on pretty much any appearance we desire.

The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering XML, XSLT, XPATH, XQuery and XSL-FO training courses in London and throughout the UK.