XSL counter on specific condition for SharePoint 2010 CQWP

Question

This is the first time I have ever posted a question so apologese in advance if I jibber here.

I am trying to put together a CQWP with jQuery tabs slider functionality. The HTML I want to output should be in the form of 2 UL's. The first with li anchor tags with #associated-ul-id

The second ul's should have ids that associate with the list items in the first. Eg

<div id="tabs" class="news">
    <div class="news-pagination">
        <a href="#" id="carouseltext-prev">&laquo; Prev</a>
        <ul id="carouseltext" class="horizontal-text order">
            <li><a href="#tabs-1">System</a></li>
            <li><a href="#tabs-2">School</a></li>
        </ul>
        <a href="#" id="carouseltext-next">&raquo; Next</a>
        <div class="clear">&nbsp;</div>
    </div>
    <ul id="tabs-1" class="feed order">
        <li>title 1</li>
        <li>title 2</li>
     </ul>
    <ul id="tabs-2" class="feed order">
        <li>title 3</li>
    </ul>
</div>

The original XML starts off in the form

My XSL goes through the XML twice to fill the 2 ul's. The first time it just adds a new list item when the __begincolumn and __begingroup variables are true. I striped down the functionality here to just output the header. Here's a stripped down version of the XSL

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:variable name="Rows" select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row" />
        <xsl:variable name="RowCount" select="count($Rows)" />
        <xsl:variable name="FirstRow" select="1" />
        <xsl:param name="ColNumber" select="1" />

        <xsl:for-each select="$Rows" >
            <xsl:variable name="CurPosition" select="position()" />
        <xsl:variable name="BeginNewsItemsList1" select="string('&lt;ul id=&quot;tabs-')" />
        <xsl:variable name="BeginNewsItemsList2" select="string('&quot;class=&quot;feed order&quot;&gt;')" />
        <xsl:variable name="BeginNewsItemsList" select="concat($BeginNewsItemsList1, $ColNumber, $BeginNewsItemsList2)" />

        <xsl:if test="($CurPosition &gt;= $FirstRow and $CurPosition &lt;= $LastRow)">
            <xsl:variable name="StartNewGroup" select="@__begingroup = 'True'" />
            <xsl:variable name="StartNewColumn" select="@__begincolumn = 'True'" />
            <xsl:when test="$StartNewGroup and $StartNewColumn">
                    <xsl:choose>
                <xsl:when test="$CurPosition = $FirstRow">
                    <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="$BeginNewsItemsList" />
                </xsl:when>
                <xsl:otherwise>
                    <!-- other instructions -->
                </xsl:otherwise>
                </xsl:choose>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:when test="$StartNewGroup">
                <xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.CallFooterTemplate"/>
                <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="concat($EndColumn, $BeginNewsItemsList)" />
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
            </xsl:otherwise>
            </xsl:if>           
        </xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="OuterTemplate.Count">
    <xsl:param name="ColNumber" />
    <xsl:value-of select="$ColNumber + 1" />
</xsl:template>

For the second for-each loop I'm having trouble setting up a counter so that I can add the number to the end of the id for each new list id="tabs-1", id="tabs-2", etc.

In theory I think I should set a parameter outside my for-each loop and then in the loop call a template that gets the parameter value and increments it. That would mean it would increment only when the template is called.

I can't use position() for this as it doesn't correspond to the values I want. I've tried to follow a couple a few blogs about recursive programming with xsl, but I can't seem to find anything that works. I'm sure I'm just writing the XSL wrong, but I'm having a bit of a brain dump now.

If anybody could point me in the right direction that would be awesome. Thanks very much.

Answer 1

You can't change variable's values after declaration. You can use them in expressions and/or pass as parameters. Thus, you can't use outside variable as counter explicitly. One available trick is recursive cycle like:

     <?xml version="1.0"?>

 <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
     <xsl:template match="root">
        <HTML>
           <BODY>
                <xsl:call-template name="for">
                    <xsl:with-param name="i" select="1"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="n" select="5"/>
                </xsl:call-template>
           </BODY>
        </HTML>
     </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template name="for">
    <xsl:param name="i"/>
    <xsl:param name="n"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="$i"/>
    <xsl:if test="$i &lt; $n">
       <xsl:text>, </xsl:text>
       <xsl:call-template name="for">
            <xsl:with-param name="i" select="$i+1"/>
            <xsl:with-param name="n" select="$n"/>
       </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

result: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5