Generating xml attribute value with XSL

Question

I am new to using XSL. I am trying to tranform data entered into a datacapture template and generate an xml file. I am capturing data that should be attribute values. I know that my paths are correct but I get an error during generation. Help!

<!-- <xsl:value-of select='odnodes/node/comments'/> -->
<node name="<xsl:value-of select='odnodes/node/name'/>" 
      host="<xsl:value-of select='odnodes/node/host'/>" 
      port="<xsl:value-of select='odnodes/node/port'/>" 
/>

The end result would look something like this:

<!-- uat server - added 2/7/2013 -->
<node name="webserver_uat" host="192.168.1.1" port="20014" />

Answer 1

Attribute Value Templates are your friend here. The correct syntax for what you are trying to achieve is

<node name="{odnodes/node/name}" 
      host="{odnodes/node/host}" 
      port="{odnodes/node/port}" />

The curly braces here indicate it is an expression to be evaluated, as opposed output literally.

Note, you could also use xsl:attribute to create attribute:

<node>
   <xsl:attribute name="name"><xsl:value-of select="odnodes/node/name" /></xsl:attribute>
   <xsl:attribute name="host"><xsl:value-of select="odnodes/node/name" /></xsl:attribute>
   <xsl:attribute name="port"><xsl:value-of select="odnodes/node/name" /></xsl:attribute>
</node>

But as you can see this is more verbose, and you would only really need to do it this way if you wanted 'conditional' attributes. (i.e You wrap one of the attributes in an xsl:if, for example, or vary the attribute name depending on a value in the input XML).