Template Modes Martin Holmes DHSI 2013, University of Victoria Women Writers Project (via website)
url:mailto:wwp@northeastern.edu

Born digital

 Began writing this file.
Template Modes You know how to write templates to process nodes. Typically, you have one template to process head nodes, another to process p nodes, and so on. However, sometimes you want to process the same node in different ways. One effective way to do this is using the mode attribute.
Why process the same node in two different ways?

Imagine you have a document structured like this:

Chapter 1: How it all started

[...]

[...]

[...]

Chapter 2: What happened next

[...]

[...]

[...]

Chapter 3: Things that subsequently transpired

[...]

[...]

[...]

[...] ]]>
Why process the same node in two different ways? Each head element needs to be processed in a particular way when it shows up in its chapter. However, you also want to create a table of contents, based on a list of the head elements. The heads will need to be processed differently for the TOC.
Two templates for the same node

Using modes, we can write two different templates for the same node:

id="chapter_{parent::div/@n}" ]]> mode="toc"
  • href="#chapter_{parent::div/@n}"
    • ]]>
    Two templates for the same node

    The first template, which processes the head at the beginning of the chapter, creates an h2 element with a unique id:

    id="chapter_{parent::div/@n}" ]]>
    Two templates for the same node

    The second template, which processes the head element in the context of a table of contents, creates a list item (li) element containing a link which points to the chapter heading:

    mode="toc"
  • href="#chapter_{parent::div/@n}"
    • ]]>
    Creating the table of contents ]]><ul class="tocList"> select="//div[@type='chapter']/head" mode="toc" ]]></ul> ]]>
    Results

    This is what the output might look like:
    More on modes One template can serve multiple modes: ]]> There are two special mode values you can apply to an xsl:template: #all (applies to all modes) #default (applies when no mode attribute is specified) There is one special mode value you can apply to an xsl:apply-templates: #current (apply templates using whatever mode is current in the processing cascade) These only really become useful when you are using lots of modes throughout a transformation.