Get the newest 5 articles out of hundreds -- a super efficient sort in XSLT

By Dimitre Novatchev

Language	XSLT
Category	designpatterns, xml, msxml
Posted	26 Feb 2001
Updated	05 Mar 2001

Summary

This snippet shows how given a set of name/value pairs for a record from a set of records, to "reconstitute" the whole records.

This problem was first formulated by my friend Corey Haines. Given a set of name/value pairs for a record from a set of records, we must "reconstitute" the whole records.

For example, given the xml document specified in this snippet:

<root>
  <data>
    <item id='1' name='age' value='25' />
    <item id='2' name='age' value='27' />
    <item id='2' name='cool' value='no' />
    <item id='1' name='cool' value='yes' />
  </data>
</root>

the result will be:


id	age	cool
1	25	yes
2	27	no

This snippet illustrates selecting distinct values by sorting, and also how to generate "plain text".

It also demonstrates how to produce a comma-separated list of items (every row).

Note how two xsl:variables are defined and used in two nested xsl:for-each loops in order to produce the two-dimensional table.

XML Source

XSL Stylesheet

XML/HTML Result:

Text Result: