Re: XML XPath expression help

[Bill Siggelkow]

Dylan, you could try using <x:set> to expose the sourceID as a variable 
that then referenced in the inner <x:forEach> like the following:

<x:forEach select="$news//eachNewsArticle">
  <x:set select="sourceID" var="source"/>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <x:out select="articleDate" />
    </td>
    <x:forEach select="$newsSources//[EMAIL PROTECTED]">
...
It should work but I have not actually tried it so YMMV ...

Dylan MacDonald wrote:

Hi -

Last week I had a question about writing an XPath expression that would
retrieve only the first few records from an XML source.  I got an immediate
response which worked perfectly.  Hopefully I'll have the same luck with
this question.
I have a JSP page that displays a list of random internet articles that I
use in my corporate intranet.  The list includes the article title and a
link to the article, as well as the source and the link to the source's
website.
While the articles are all unique, the sources are not.  Rather than
duplicate the name and URL of each source for each article, I would create a
second XML file for the sources, assign a unique ID to each source and then
reference that ID in my articles XML file.  Then, on the JSP page itself, I
would import both XML files and then just use some kind of XPath expression
in the forEach statement to compare the IDs.  Well, this doesn't work, at
least the way I did it.  It just gives me an error.
I'm sure my code has many problems, but I think the two main ones are: can
you even import two separate XML files with JSTL; and secondly, my XPath
expression is probably wrong.  Anyway if anyone has any clues, I'd surely
appreciate it.
Below is my sample code:

news.xml

<allNewsArticles>
        <eachNewsArticle>
                <articleDate>October 31, 2003</articleDate>
                <articleTitle>More quality along the supply chain</articleTitle>
<articleUrl>http://english.lz-net.de/news/webtechnews/pages/showmsg.prl?id=3
097</articleUrl>
                <sourceID>lz</sourceID>
        </eachNewsArticle>
</allNewsArticles>
####

newsSources.xml

<allNewsSources>
        <eachNewsSource>
                <sourceID>am</sourceID>
                <sourceTitle>Apparel Magazine</sourceTitle>
                <sourceUrl>http://www.apparelmag.com/</sourceUrl>
        </eachNewsSource>
</allNewsSources>
####

articles.jsp

<c:import var="news_xml" url="news.xml" />
<c:import var="newsSources_xml" url="newsSources.xml" />
<x:parse var="news" xml="${news_xml}" />
<x:parse var="newsSources" xml="${newsSources_xml}" />
--snip--

<x:forEach select="$news//eachNewsArticle">
        <tr>
                <td>
                        <x:out select="articleDate" />
                </td>
        <x:forEach select="$newsSources//eachNewsSource[sourceID =
'$news//eachNewsArticle/sourceID']">
                <td>
                        <a href="<x:out select='sourceUrl' />"><x:out select="sourceTitle" 
/></a>
                </td>
        </x:forEach>
                <td>
                        <a href="<x:out select='articleUrl' />"><x:out 
select="articleTitle"
/></a>
                </td>
        </tr>
</x:forEach>


Dylan MacDonald
Senior Web Designer
GNX
phone: 415-283-3715
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