Xslt test if value is not null

Sorry, something went wrong. I am getting below error One or more errors occurred. String literal was not closed. Skip to content. Sign in Sign up. Instantly share code, notes, and snippets. Created Sep 15, First two deal with null value and second two deal with empty string. Aleksandar Borkovac Aleksandar Borkovac 3 3 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. What if there are multiple users or multiple firstnames? Use xsl:apply-templates and matching templates to get what you want, much easier.

This is probably the simplest XPath expression the one in accepted answer provides a test for the opposite, and would be longer, if negated : not string categoryName Explanation : The argument to the not function above is false exactly when there is no categoryName child "null" of the context item, or the single such categoryName child has string value -- the empty string.

Learn more about the importance of avoiding conditional constructs in this nice Pluralsight course: " Tactical Design Patterns in. Dimitre Novatchev Dimitre Novatchev k 26 26 gold badges silver badges bronze badges.

Hi Dimitre, i need your solution for 1. Please, post a question and send me a comment with a link. Follow the guidelines how to ask a good question. Hi Dimitre, I posted a question here stackoverflow.

DustJones DustJones 71 1 1 silver badge 2 2 bronze badges. Dimitre Novatchev k 26 26 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Abel Abel Congrats on mentioning " Programming without if-branches ". There are some people who fail to understand the importance of this. For all of them here is a link to a very nice Pluralsight course on this topic: " Tactical Design Patterns in. Marie Taylor Marie Taylor 41 1 1 bronze badge. The string value of an empty node set which is what the XPath expression categoryName gives you when there are no categoryName child elements in the current context is defined to be the empty string, so this is redundant - string-length categoryName is zero if there are no categoryName elements.

Sanjeev Singh Sanjeev Singh 3, 2 2 gold badges 29 29 silver badges 38 38 bronze badges. Sanjeev Singh 3, 2 2 gold badges 29 29 silver badges 38 38 bronze badges. HSol HSol 21 1 1 bronze badge. Pedro Pereira Pedro Pereira 5 5 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges.

Jaroslav Kubacek Jaroslav Kubacek 1, 17 17 silver badges 25 25 bronze badges. The Overflow Blog. Stack Gives Back Safety in numbers: crowdsourcing data on nefarious IP addresses. Featured on Meta. Yes xsi: nil , but it is rarely used, especially in the untyped scene without a certain pattern. Programmer Group A programming skills sharing group. For example, if the categoryName is empty? What I use when selecting constructs is. To deal with all these cases using xsl:choose -style constructs, or in other words, imperatively, is quickly getting messy even more so if elements can be at different levels!

A typical programming idiom in XSLT is using templates hence the T in XSLT , which is declarative programming, not imperative you don't tell the processor what to do, you just tell what you want output if certain conditions are met. For this use-case, that can look something like the following:.

This works with any XSLT version , because the first one above has a higher precedence it has a predicate. The "fall-through" matching template, the second one, catches anything that is not valid.

The third one then takes care of outputting the categoryName value in a proper way. Note that in this scenario there is no need to specifially match categories or category , because the processor will automatically process all children, unless we tell it otherwise in this example, the second and third template do not further process the children, because there is no xsl:apply-templates in them. This approach is more easily extendible then the imperative approach, because it automically deals with multiple categories and it can be expanded for other elements or exceptions by just adding another matching template.

Programming without if-branches. Note: there is no such thing as null in XML.