Thanks Chriztian,

Can you give me a little detail on what *[][1] is actually doing in the select?

Yes - of course :-)

The XPath starts from $currentPage, using the ancestor-or-self:: axis it grabs all nodes that have a value in the headerLogoURL field, takes the first of those and selects the headerLogoURL field.

When you add square brackets to a selection step, its called a "predicate" and it works like a filter - you can loosely translate them to a WHERE clause.

normalize-space() is a handy function that trims leading and trailing as well as repeated white-space from an element, so if the value is all spaces og tabs etc. it will return an empty string.

[1] is a shortcut for [position() = 1] - in case of the ancestor-or-self:: axis, this means the first ancestor encountered when traveling upwards.

Hope that helps you understand what's going on.

/Chriztian

Yes this is very helpful, thanks very much!  I have another followup question if it is not too much trouble.

If I specify [1] for the first ancestor then in a structure:

<n1>
  <val>a</val>
  <n2>
     <val>b</val>
       <n3>
          <val></val>
       <n3>
  </n2>
  <n4>
     <val></val>
  </n4>
</n1>

On n3 I would get val = b ?
On n4 I would get val = a ? 

Am I grasping this correctly?

Thanks for your help Chriztian,

Yet another question...  I am using uComponents url picker to set headerLogoURL and it appears that even if nothing is selected or entered in the url picker it still returns a node on every Doc node:

<url-picker><new-window>False</new-window><node-id></node-id><url></url><link-title><url-picker>

How do I account for this since in my original example headerLogoURL will always be set but url-picker/url might be blank?

I tried:

<xsl:apply-templates select="$currentPage/ancestor-or-self::*[normalize-space(headerLogoURL/url-picker/url)][1]/headerLogoURL/url-picker/url" />

But then I have no idea what to select in the template.

<xsl:value-of select="???" /> 

Thanks very much in advance!

-C.

Figured out what I was doing wrong! I can now set a default logo for my site at the top level but it can be overriden on lower level documents.  So now my content editors can easily co-brand a page within the site either with a logo from the media library or an image url hosted on another site.  

Just in case anyone else is trying to do something similar here is what I ended up with:

<xsl:template match="/">
  <!-- Process the first ancestor (or self) that has a value in headerLogoURL/url-picker/url 
    and work with headerLogoURL in the next template -->
  <xsl:apply-templates select="$currentPage/ancestor-or-self::*[normalize-space(headerLogoURL/url-picker/url)][1]/headerLogoURL" />
</xsl:template>

<!-- Template for the headerLogoURL -->
<xsl:template match="headerLogoURL">
 <a href="/"><xsl:attribute name="style">display:block; width:349px; height:200px; background:transparent url('<xsl:value-of select="url-picker/url"/>') no-repeat center;</xsl:attribute>Home</a>
</xsl:template>

 Thanks again Chriztian

Hi cchehn,

Great to see you arrived at something that works :-)

Just to clarify your questions regarding the ancestor:: axis: You're not quite right on that - it gives you the parent, its parent, that one's parent etc., so you would never get any siblings of the current node (which is what you're guessing at).

The preceding:: axis will give you those - but you should really give the XPath Axes Visualizer a spin to really get the hang of them :-)

/Chriztian

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