Here's the XML file:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="2.xsl" ?>
<root>
<shop>
<person>
<employee>
<name> Alexis </name>
<role> Manager </role>
<task> Sales </task>
</employee>
<employee>
<name> Employee2 </name>
</employee>
</person>
<employee>
<name> Blake2 </name>
</employee>
</shop>
<person>
<employee2>
<role2> Supervisor </role2>
<name2> Blake </name2>
<task2> Control </task2>
</employee2>
</person>
</root>
Here's the XSLT file:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="root">
<html><head></head>
<body>
Start of root in XSLT <p/> <xsl:apply-templates select="person" /> <p/>
End of root in XSLT
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="shop">
"Step 1 start"
<xsl:apply-templates select="*/*"/>
"Step 1 done" <p/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="employee">
<u> <xsl:apply-templates select="name"/> </u>
(Task: <xsl:apply-templates select="task"/>)
<br></br>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
The output is:
Start of root in XSLT
Supervisor Blake Control
End of root in XSLT
My question is, why isn't Alexis and Employee2 part of the output? They're both under the <person> element.....
<xsl:template match="root"> is applied to the <root> element. In there, <xsl:apply-templates select="person" /> selects the <person> element that is an immediate child of the current node (the root element <root>). As there is no template defined for <person> itself, XSLT's default behavior is executed which means that only text nodes are copied.
The other templates are not executed at all, as there are no <shop> or <employee> elements on the root level (relative to the document itself), and the templates are not invoked via <apply-templates>, either.
To answer your question more explicitly, the first <person> element does not get selected because it is nested in another element, but your <apply-templates> instruction only selects <person> elements that are directly visible in the current node.