<xsl:if test="position() &lt;= 4">...</xsl.if>

Will this not give the position of the node in scope? What if that node is to be excluded based on the date? Will it still be counted or will the position() refer to the position of the nodes added in to the output??

I have a feeling that position() will report the position of the node in scope...

Hi Sean,

Your feeling is right, part of the way. Normally, in XSLT, if you have a template for an element, and you use the apply-templates instruction to output these, you'd get the position of the node in the original XML document when using position(), even if you use the sort instruction to reorder the elements. The for-each instruction is your friend here, because it will change the context and give you the new position() values.

So you want to use for-each to select the nodes in question and sort them by date, then test the value of position() before applying templates - something like this pseudo-code:

<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:for-each select="/path/to/list/item">
        <xsl:sort select="@date" data-type="text" order="descending" />
        <xsl:if test="position() &lt;= 4">
            <xsl:apply-templates select="." />
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="item">
    <!-- Output for item -->
</xsl:template>

Hope it helps,

/Chriztian

Hi Chriztian - thanks for the reply and apologies for the delay in replying myself.

The above situation that you stated makes sense, but I'm still a bit confused about how to limit the OUTPUT number of nodes to 4. My exact context is that I have a number of News nodes - and I only wish to display the current (i.e. news relevant to today or later) nodes on the page.

So I will need an AND statement in my <xsl:for-each... for example (pseudo-code)

<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:for-each select="$currentPage//node[@nodeTypeAlias = 'News']" AND "umbraco.library:DateGreaterThanOrEqualToday(current()/data [@alias='newsDate'])">
  <xsl:sort select="data" order="ascending" />
        <xsl:if test="position() &lt;= 4">
          OUTPUT HERE
   etc...

Anad that's not possible, as far as I'm aware.

Does that make more sense of what I am trying to achieve?

Thanks,
Sean

Perfect - thanks Peter, and the others who got me there eventually.

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