[j-nsp] understaning the copy-node in SLAX

[Phil Shafer]

Martin T writes:
>Thanks! And this technique is useful in case cli process expects an
>element node(for example "interface-information") to have additional
>attribute nodes(for example "junos:style="terse"")? Does it provide
>any advantages over statically specifying the attribute node?

No, there's really no advantage.  I almost didn't bother including
it in the language; it's just there for completeness.  "element
name()" gives identical functionality.

>For
>example, here I rewrote two named templates and a match template of an
>op script example from "Automating Junos Administration" book:

Can you give a page number?

>template handle-logical-intf($family) {
>        <logical-interface> {
>                for-each (*[name() != "address-family"]) {
>                        copy-of .;
>                }
>                for-each (address-family[address-family-name=$family]) {
>                        copy-of .;
>                }
>        }
>}

You might want:

    <logical-interface> {
        copy-of @*;
        for-each ...

... to copy the attributes off the current node.

Using "copy-node" here gives you a means of avoiding hardcoding
the name, but that's pretty unimportant for code like this where
the functionality is so closely tied to the name.

If the W3C had given copy-node a target xpath or an interesting
default content template (like the identity template), then it would
be more useful.  But it doesn't.

Thanks,
 Phil