Skipping ahead, let me try to rephrase this. First, this isn't really a python question, it is SQL, XSLT, and program design, but I'll try to answer.
You have templates, they contain general layout stuff, and input fields. You are transforming them into HTML pages, and part of what you want to do is to expand the enumerated fields with the enumeration values at the time of template application. You read an article about XSLT, and decided that you could use it in your app. For some unknown reason, perhaps involving large amounts of alcohol, you want to use the syntax of XSLT, but have it actually parsed by python, which silently does an SQL querry to give you your results. This is a really, really bad idea. There are many ways to solve your problem using XSLT, and though all of them are easy, none of them are so simple that I could put them in a post to someone who doesn't know XSLT. If you know XSLT, follow the directions below, if you don't, DO NOT USE XSLT for this project. And for the love of anything you may believe in, don't try to implement a partial XSLT engine in python. Pattern 1, paramaterized templates: Pattern 1 assumes that all the data you will need for your templates is known in advance, and is common to your templates. If this is true, you need only generate an XML fragment with the data you need, and compose a document which contains both the data you need, and the page template you are rendering. Then, write an XSLT transform to build your pages, which can now resolve data needs in the template section using the data provided in the data section. Pattern 2, query extraction: When you don't know what data the page template might need, and the full dataset is unmanageably large, you can't use pattern 1 easily. So instead, write an XSLT transform which _only_ extracts information about the data you need. You can then run this transform, get the query list, perform the queries, and use the resultant data for the data tree from pattern 1. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
