I reckon Helena wants a piece of code (maybe a plugin) that looks up
meta-data (meta/foo.xml) and provides links "like" google about authors
and their articles. 

Like I understood it she wants to have 2 different pages for that.
e.g. overview page (generated from meta/foo.xml):
<a href="../by_author_thorsten.html">All articles by thorsten</a>
<a href="../by_author_ross.html">All articles by ross</a>
...

Then each by_author_*.html should contain links to the articles the
author wrote in a paginator style view (as well generated from
meta/foo.xml or by a xpath dir generator?).
e.g. All articles by ross
<a href="site:some/site">ross on plugins</a>
...

http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/howto/howto-paginator-transformer.html

Helena we do not use yet metadata in forrest. What you are planing to do
would IMO be a good plugin, but you would need to write it. AFAIK nobody
have done that before. Besides that it is far more then a user question
and should better discussed on dev. 

Please follow Ross tips. ;-)

salu2

On Mon, 2005-09-05 at 08:16 +0100, Ross Gardler wrote: 
> Helena Edelson wrote:
> > I mean how in *xdocs* files would you do the equivalent of @author_id or:
> > 
> > <a href="../by_author_{author_id}.html">{name}</a>
> 
> I'm still not sure what you mean, where is the {author_id} parameter 
> coming from? That is, what supplies that value for this token?
> 
> Like I said earlier, there is an author element in the XDoc, can't you 
> just use that with a custom transformation to give you the link you want?
> 
> If the author tag is no use to you then you need to create your own 
> pipelines to do these replacements. There are a number of ways of doing 
> it. Perhaps the easiest way, if you do not have detailed Cocoon 
> knowledge, is to use an XSLT transformation to do the replacements. You 
> need to pass the values in to the transformation and have the XSLT do 
> the replacements, see my earlier reply (copied below) for a hint on how 
> to do this.
> 
> You may also consider using the JXTempalteTransformer 
> http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/userdocs/transformers/jx-template-transformer.html
> 
> Another alternative is XSP: 
> http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/userdocs/xsp/index.html
> 
> If you more clearly define the problem we can probably give you more 
> direct help, i.e. code examples.
> 
> > on the second, I mean how to write the line of code, I'm not sure what 
> > the $x or @x I have to look at the number of entries of type foo and 
> > only show say 4 of the total number in an xsl file. how you would write 
> > the value to stop at and the ($entries.......)*] part
> > does that make any sense at all?
> 
> I'm reeally not sure I am understranding your problem. The xsl is:
> 
> <xsl:for-each select="(articles/article[@type='foo'][position() &lt; 5 ]">
> 
> If you want to pass the number of elements being processed in as a 
> parameter then see my earlier response which tells you how to find 
> examples in our source code.
> 
> Note, this list is not the best place to get help with XSLT. If you need 
> more help with XSLT I'd recomend taking a look at the tutorials on 
> http://www.zvon.org
> 
> Ross
> 
> > 
> > thx
> > Holly
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Ross Gardler wrote:
> > 
> >> Helena Edelson wrote:
> >>
> >>> I know how to code for forrest for this link in the xsl files:
> >>>
> >>> <a href="../by_author_holly.html">Holly Edelson</a>
> >>>
> >>> but how do you code for this sort of link in an xdocs/*.xml file?
> >>> can I put dynamic code there?
> >>
> >>
> >> In what way is it dynamic? Isn't the authors tag sufficient?
> >>
> >> http://forrest.apache.org/dtdx/document-v20.dtdx.html#authors
> >>
> >>> Also, how, for  src/xdocs/index.xml file can you code the xsl for it 
> >>> to count the entries in the /meta-data/foo.xml, set a max integer 
> >>> (value) for to generate on the xdocs/index.html page when you run 
> >>> forrest to only show x number of entries for category foo if exists 
> >>> and not show the rest?
> >>>
> >>> I mean, say I have type foo and type bar in my meta-data/foo.xml 
> >>> file. Say I have 10 items of type foo and 10 items of type bar, but I 
> >>> only want the generated home page (html) to display 4 per type?
> >>> is it like <xsl:for-each select="articles/article[ type= foo][ 
> >>> *position() &lt; ($entries+1)* ]">?
> >>>                                                                                                       
> >>> ->this is where I don't have a clue
> >>
> >>
> >> Do you mean you want to know how to pass the value of $entries into 
> >> the XSL?
> >>
> >> If so take a look at our sitemaps, there are lots of examples. Search 
> >> for "<map:paramter"
> >>
> >> You could also pass it in using a configuraiton file. You can also see 
> >> examples of this in our skins, search for "$config".
> >>
> >> Ross
> >>
> >>
> 
-- 
thorsten

"Together we stand, divided we fall!" 
Hey you (Pink Floyd)