Search Results XSL Question

I had a question from a colleague today about how to do an XSL transformation of some search results.  Here’s the query:

Basically, I want to do the following in XSL:

1. Parse a managed property, urlEncoded, that has the format of http://[doc library]/[filename] to separate path and filename
2. Take that prefix and concatenate it with ‘/Forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=’
3. Take that and concatenate it with another managed property, owsidinteger

All this in one big ugly xsl statement.

This is actually pretty simple, if you know how to do it!  Let’s assume some data for urlEncoded like this:

• http://servername.com/doclib/doc1.doc
• http://subdomain.servername.com/doclib/doc1.doc
• http://subdomain.servername.com/site1/site2/site3/doclib/doc1.doc

Those are the three big levels of complexity.  Visiting the excellent reference MDSN article about the ddwrt namespace by Serge van den Oever, we can see that the UrlDirName function may do the trick:

public string UrlDirName(string szUrl);

Returns the directory name of the file in the given URL szUrl. For example, if szUrl is "/a/b/basename.ext", the value "/a/b/" is returned.

With the data above, UrlDirName will return the following:

• /doclib
• /doclib
• /site1/site2/site3/doclib

So the ‘big ugly XSL’ answer is:

<xsl:value-of select="concat(ddwrt:UrlDirName(string(urlEncoded)), '/Forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=', owsidinteger)"/>

The syntax for the hyperlink is something like:

<a href="{concat(ddwrt:UrlDirName(string(urlEncoded)), '/Forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=', owsidinteger)}">
<xsl:value-of select="@Title"/>
</a>

Note the squiggly brackets.  I think the most common ‘gotcha’ with using the ddwrt functions is forgetting to do the explicit string conversion.