Displaying a Multi-Select Column "Nicely" in a DVWP with Web Services

<UPDATE dateTime=”2011-06-29T18:11Z”>I fixed a bug in the template where it didn’t always show the final value in the multi-select.</UPDATE>

In a previous post entitled Displaying a Multi-Select Column “Nicely”, I gave a recursive XSL function which split apart the values in a multi-select column and gave you the option to separate them with any separating text you chose.

In the comments on that post, I recently was asked how to adapt that function to work for multi-select values that are returned by the Lists Web Service (GetListItems).  The values that GetListItems passes back are separated differently, like this:

247;#Miami;#1;#Abington;#2;#Acton;#3;#Acushnet;#4;#Adams;#5;#Agawam;#6;#Amesbury;#7;#Amherst;#8;#Amherst Center

and here’s the XSL to format it “nicely”:

<xsl:template name="MultiSelectDisplay">
  <xsl:param name="MultiSelectValue"/>
  <xsl:param name="MultiSelectSeparator"/>
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="contains($MultiSelectValue, ';#')">
      <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="string-length(substring-before(substring-after($MultiSelectValue, ';#'), ';#')) &gt; 0">
          <xsl:value-of select="concat(substring-before(substring-after($MultiSelectValue, ';#'), ';#'), $MultiSelectSeparator)" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
          <xsl:call-template name="MultiSelectDisplay">
            <xsl:with-param name="MultiSelectValue" select="substring-after(substring-after($MultiSelectValue, ';#'), ';#')"/>
            <xsl:with-param name="MultiSelectSeparator" select="$MultiSelectSeparator"/>
          </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
          <xsl:value-of select="substring-after($MultiSelectValue, ';#')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
        </xsl:otherwise>
      </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
      <xsl:value-of select="substring-after($MultiSelectValue, ';#')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
    </xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

It just required some simple tweaks to get it to deal with the ‘;#’ separators rather than the ‘;’ separator.