How to use an incremented counter to provide a unique id in XSLT?

Question

I am using XSLT to convert a very large XML document into (X)HTML. For some of the tags I am converting them to a

. I would like to be able to create

Answer 1

You can add callouts to static methods on Java classes to your transforms... it works but there are some downsides like 1) Now your transform is tied to some Java code and is harder to test/debug in external tools like Oxygen (although there are some ways to mitigate this) 2) You have to maintain state as statics or perhaps thread locals, which can introduce all kinds of problems (synchronization issues, questions about resetting if you are doing this multiple times, Etc)