Name

<xsl:otherwise> — Defines the else or default case in an <xsl:choose> element. This element always appears inside an <xsl:choose> element, and it must always appear last.

Category

Subinstruction (<xsl:otherwise> always appears as part of an <xsl:choose> element).

Required Attributes

None.

Optional Attributes

None.

Content

A template.

Appears in

The <xsl:choose> element.

Defined in

XSLT section 9.2, Conditional Processing with xsl:choose.

Example

As an example, we’ll use an <xsl:choose> element that cycles through a set of values for the background color of a cell in an HTML table. We’ll use this XML document as our input:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<list xml:lang="en">
  <title>Albums I've bought recently:</title>
  <listitem>The Sacred Art of Dub</listitem>
  <listitem>Only the Poor Man Feel It</listitem>
  <listitem>Excitable Boy</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="sw">Aki Special</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="en-gb">Combat Rock</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="zu">Talking Timbuktu</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="jz">The Birth of the Cool</listitem>
</list>

Here is our stylesheet, which uses <xsl:choose> inside an <xsl:attribute> element to determine the correct value for the bgcolor attribute. We have an <xsl:otherwise> element that generates the value whitesmoke for every fourth <listitem> in our source document:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="html"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <html> <head> <title> <xsl:value-of select="list/title"/> ...

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