XSLT: How to find the count of unique children of a node?

Question

My XML looks like this:

    
        
            2
            3&         


        

Answer 1

If all the baz children are same then doSomething else doSomethingElse. My current node is foo.

This is confusing because:

• baz are not children of foo;
• your title says "find the count of unique children" - but it is not necessary to find it in order to know if they are same.

Try something like:

Note that this assumes that every baz has a date and a time. Otherwise you need to test for not(date=$first-baz/date) etc.

See also: http://www.jenitennison.com/xslt/grouping/muenchian.html

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Added:

Now, assuming all the bar/baz elements have the same tags (not necessarily date and time but say a, b and c), what would be the test attribute for that case?

This makes it significantly more complex. Still you could construct a key:

then make your test:

This returns true if any child of baz exists whose string-value is different from an equally named node that is child of the first baz.

Note that the key, as defined here, is document-wide. If you want to restrict the test to the current foo ancestor, then you must include its id in the key.