Trouble converting elements to attributes with XSLT

[doozer1979]

Hello,

I'm having a bit of difficulty transforming xml elements into attributes.

I want to loop through all of the <person> elements in the document and turn all of its child elements into attributes of the person element.

The code i am using takes the last <person> element and changes all of its elements into attributes of the root node and then removes all of child elements of every person element.


This is the code that i am currently using.



<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0" >

<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>

<xsl:template match="*">

<xsl:copy>
<xsl:for-each select="person/*">
<xsl:attribute name="{name(.)}">
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:attribute>
</xsl:for-each>
<xsl:apply-templates select="*[* or @*]|text()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>


</xsl:stylesheet>



the base xml document looks like this:


<root>
<person>
<name>Johnny</name>
<id>1</id>
<departme#nt>CEO</sales>
<reports-to>null</reports-to>
</person>
<person>
<name>Madge</name>
<id>2</id>
<departme#nt>VP</sales>
<reports-to>1</reports-to>
</person>
<person>
<name>Pip</name>
<id>3</id>
<departme#nt>VP</sales>
<reports-to>1</reports-to>
</person>
</root>



after the transformation it looks like this:

<root name="Pip" id="3" department="VP" reports-to="1">
<person></person>
<person></person>
<person></person>
</root>


I want it to look like this:


<root>
<person name="Johnny" id="1" department="CEO" reports-to="Null"></person>
<person name="Madge" id="2" department="VP" reports-to="1"></person>
<person name="Pip" id="3" department="VP" reports-to="1"></person>
</root>


Your help is greatly appreciated!

thanks.

[jkmyoung]

1. The for loop is a level too high -> You get all the attributes in the first node.
2. Your template matches root first. There's 2 possible fixes

A. Have 1 template for root, 1 for person.
B. Rewrite to use other generic templates.

I like B better, so I'll show the solution for that.

<xsl:template match="*[*]"> <!-- copy element with children -->
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="*[not (*)]"> 
   <xsl:attribute name="{name()}">
     <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>
 

The condition [not(*)] isn't really necessary, but helps avoid confusion.

[doozer1979]

Many thanks. Great Solution!