stoj wrote:
> I'm a little confused by your statement that XSL can't generate dynamic XSL.  
> Aren't the following (valid) alternative uses of a variable also examples of 
> dynamic behaviour, whereby the generated XSL/HTML code changes as it is 
> processed?;
> a) assigned element text value to the variable
> b) supply as an argument to an xpath function, eg. concat($var, ".ext")?
> 
> eg. snippet of relevant XML
> <root>
>   <bearerTable>
>     <bearer>
>       <name>ethernet</name>
>       ...other elements
>     </bearer>
>     <bearer>
>       <name>ppp</name>
>       ...other elements
>     </bearer>
>   </bearerTable>
> 
>   <networkTable>
>     <network>
>       <name>home</name>
>       <bearerRef>bearer.ppp</bearerRef>
>       ...other elements
>     </network>
>     <network>
>       <name>work</name>
>       <bearerRef>bearer.ethernet</bearerRef>
>       ...other elements
>     </network>
>   </networkTable>
> </root>      
> 
> What i'm trying to do is translate above xml into html as follows;
> a) marking up all <name> elements as anchors, eg. <a name="bearer.ethernet">
> b) marking up all <xxxxxRef> elements as anchor references, eg. <a 
> href="#bearer.ethernet">
> 
> Easy enough, except that before i create the anchor references, i want to 
> check if the specified xml bearer element actually exists first.  
> eg. xsl with bearer ref as current context
> <!-- using some string xpath fns; concat, substring-before, etc. to create a 
> string variable that holds a valid xpath like; 
> $ref=/root/bearerTable/bearer/name/ethernet -->
> <xsl:if test="$ref">
> ...create anchor reference
> </xsl:if>
> 
> One alternative i've found is to explicitly check each <name> value in a 
> xsl:for-each loop, but in my view this is very messy & slow(?).  Personally, 
> i'd prefer to let XSL do the hardwork and use it's XPath pattern matching... 
> but is this possible when the XPath argument is supplied as a variable?
> 
> cheers
> stoj

Something along these lines, perhaps:

<xsl:template match="network">
  <xsl:variable name="refName" select="substring-after(bearerRef,'.')"/>
  <xsl:if test="/root/bearerTable/bearer/name[. = $refName]">
   <a href="#bearer.{$refName}"><xsl:value-of select="name"/></a>
  </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>