nodetree to tablestructure

["Jeroen Alblas" <jeroena@infosupport.com>]

Hello,

I'm writing XSLT code to turn XML data into a DocBook book. I'm stuck at
the moment trying to turn an XML node structure into a table. The XML is
representing a flow of actions. The "parallel" tag holds actionflows
that can occur simultaneously.

Say I have the following XML structure:

<tree id=1>
   <action name="a1"/>
   <action name="a2"/>
   <parallel>
      <tree id=2>
      <tree id=3>
   </parallel>
   <action name="a3"/>
</tree>

<tree id=2>
   <action name="a4"/>
   <action name="a5"/>
</tree>

<tree id=3>
   <action name="a6"/>
</tree>

The table should something like this:
-------------------------------------------------
|                      a1                       |
-------------------------------------------------
|                      a2                       |
-------------------------------------------------
|         a4            |           a6          |
-------------------------------------------------
|         a5            |        <empty>        |
-------------------------------------------------
|                      a3                       |
-------------------------------------------------

When transforming an XML tree like this to an HTML table, the nested
sturcture can be solved with nesting HTML tables. I believe this can't
be done with DocBook tables.

The example is quite simple, but imagine the nesting to be more deeply.
The tree with ID 3 could contain another parallel tag, for instance.

Maybe someone has had (and solved) this problem before.

I've searched the DocBook documentation for tagsturctures that can
represent a tree structure, but alas. Understandable though, because
then you would have to create tags for all kind of diagrams I guess
(flowcharts, pieslices, what have you).

Thnx!
Jeroen.


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