for-each or apply-templates on computed elements?

["Mark D. Anderson" <mda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

suppose i have several "section" elements in my source xml.
suppose further that there is a "role" attribute which has
to be author|caveats|usage|... .

now, in my xsl style sheet, i want to format those sections
in basically the same way, but i want to determine a fixed
order for those sections (say, author, usage, caveats, etc.)
which is independent of the order in the source xml.

i don't want that ordering to be placed in the source xml.

conceptually, i want to do something like:
<xsl:constant name="sorted_section_names">
  <s id="author"/><s id="usage"/><s id="caveats"/>
</xsl:constant>

<xsl:for-each select="{constant(sorted_section_names)}/s" var="foo">
  <xsl:apply-templates select="section[(@role=foo(@id)]"/>
</xsl:for-each>

or, as another approach:

<xsl:constant name="sorted_section_names">
  <s id="author" order="1"/><s id="usage" order="2"/><s id="caveats" order="3"/>
</xsl:constant>

<xsl:apply-templates select="section"><xsl:sort select="{constant(sorted_section_names)/s[@role=@id]@order"/>

both of the above don't work, of course.

-mda



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