Re: [patch] removal of chiuldElement attributes in dispspec files

On Oct 14, 2004, at 8:50 AM, Boris Goldowsky wrote:

>
>>
>> 2) Examples where I find the use of XPath limiting
>>
>> For a document containing something like
>>
>>   <examples><example>...</example><example>...</example></examples>
>>
>> I have xpath="concat('Number of examples = ',count(example))" for the
>> examples tag. I would like each example tag to have an XPath 
>> expression
>> which results in the text "Example <n> of <m>". It's easy to get the 
>> <m>,
>> but not the <n>, via XPath. Or perhaps I should say I can't work out 
>> how
>> to get the <n>.
>
> <n> = count(preceding-sibling::example)+1
>
> or, depending on what context is given to the XPath engine, simply
>  position()
> could be made to work.

Yahay. The use of preceding-sibling does what I want. Thanks for that. 
I never got position() to work when I last tried it a while back.

>
>>
>> Another case is that of conditionals; e.g. if there is a child element
>> called title then use its contents, but if not then act as if there 
>> is no
>> XPath expression.
>
> I don't see an easy solution for that.  Perhaps there should be a
> fallback display for any case where the xpath results in a null or an
> empty string.

One idea is to allow the user to supply a XSL template which, when run, 
gives the text to use. I think there are more urgent things to 
implement first though :-)

Doug