rhino wrote:
> Given that these are two separate XML files but that there is some common 
> information, specifically the department number, could I use XSLT to 
> generate a report that shows me each department name followed by the names 
> of the people who work in the department?

XSLT can certainly reference more than one input source, using the 
document() function; then it's just a matter of writing expressions that 
use data from one document to look up information in the other document.

There are probably examples on the XSLT FAQ website... but seriously, 
once you know about the document() function it really isn't any harder 
than if you were recombining data read from a single document.

The only tricky part, really, is deciding how you're going to tell the 
stylesheet which two sources to look at. Common solutions are passing 
one of the URIs in as a parameter, or having one hardcoded into the 
stylesheet, or having a front-end document which the stylesheet obtains 
both the actual URIs from.... Which of those solutions is best depends 
on the environment you're performing this operation in. Note that all of 
'em are extensible to more than 2 documents.

As to what to call it: Conceptually it's certainly a join or merge. The 
former term is more likely to be recognized by DB and data-structure 
folks, the latter is more familiar to folks coming to XML and XSLT from 
the document-markup side of the world. I wouldn't get hung up on the 
terminology; the clearest solution is probably to do exactly what you 
did, provide a brief example of what you're trying to accomplish.