What I am trying to do is take a specific node, in the example <person>, and combine it into a list of all the person nodes available. Here is my sample source:
<group groupName="The Little Rascals">
<peopleInGroup>
<people>
<person>
<name value="John Doe">
<birthdate value="01/01/1953">
</person>
<person>
<name value="John Doe 2">
<birthdate value="01/01/1953">
</person>
<childrenInGroup>
<person>
<name value="Jane">
<birthdate value="01/01/1973">
</person>
<person>
<name value="Suzie">
<birthdate value="01/01/1970">
</person>
</childrenInGroup>
</people>
</peopleInGroup>
</group>
In this case what I am wanting to do is get a list of all the <person> elements regardless of level and loop over each one. The list would look something like this:
<person>
<name value="John Doe">
<birthdate value="01/01/1953">
</person>
<person>
<name value="John Doe 2">
<birthdate value="01/01/1953">
</person>
<person>
<name value="Jane">
<birthdate value="01/01/1973">
</person>
<person>
<name value="Suzie">
<birthdate value="01/01/1970">
</person>
The only sorting I would want to do in this case might be by Birthday. I was thinking that something like a Deep Copy of the <person> node, but I do not know what the implementation of that would look like.
Once the list is created, the idea would be to loop over the list in a for-each like this:
<xsl:for-each select="$persons">
<xsl:value-of select="@name"/>
<xsl:value-of select="@birthday"/>
</xsl:for-each>
Thanks for the help!
Apart from the sorting you can simply use XPath with //person to select all person elements as a sequence.
If you want to sort them you can use xsl:perform-sort:
<xsl:variable name="sorted-persons" as="element(person)*">
<xsl:perform-sort select="descendant::person">
<xsl:sort select="xs:date(replace(birthdate/@value, '([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{4})', '$3-$2-$1'))"/>
</xsl:perform-sort>
</xsl:variable>
You can then use that sorted sequence in a for-each if you want or directly output the data using value-of: https://xsltfiddle.liberty-development.net/94hvTyZ