Declaring a xsl variable and assigning value to it

Question

I'm working on an application which uses apache cocoon to convert an XML to PDF, and I'm redesigning the XSL that handles the input XML.

Currently in the XSL, we have code like this

<xsl:variable name="variable1">
   <xsl:choose>
     <xsl:when test="$testVariable ='1'">
        <xsl:value-of select="'A'"/>
     </xsl:when>
     <xsl:when test="$testVariable ='1'">
        <xsl:value-of select="'B'"/>
     </xsl:when>
   </xsl:choose>
</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="variable2">
   <xsl:choose>
     <xsl:when test="$testVariable ='1'">
        <xsl:value-of select="'X'"/>
     </xsl:when>
     <xsl:when test="$testVariable ='1'">
        <xsl:value-of select="'Y'"/>
     </xsl:when>
   </xsl:choose>
</xsl:variable>

Will it work if I change it to this?

<xsl:variable name="variable1"/>
<xsl:variable name="variable2"/>
<xsl:choose>
   <xsl:when test="$testVariable ='1'">
         <xsl:variable name="variable1" select="'A'">        
         <xsl:variable name="variable2" select="'X'">
   </xsl:when> 
   <xsl:when test="$testVariable ='2'">
         <xsl:variable name="variable1" select="'B'">        
         <xsl:variable name="variable2" select="'Y'">
   </xsl:when> 
</xsl:choose>

Answer 1

No, unlike in a lot of other languages, XSLT variables cannot change their values after they are created. You can however, avoid extraneous code with a technique like this:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

  <xsl:variable name="mapping">
    <item key="1" v1="A" v2="B" />
    <item key="2" v1="X" v2="Y" />
  </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="mappingNode"
                select="document('')//xsl:variable[@name = 'mapping']" />

  <xsl:template match="....">
    <xsl:variable name="testVariable" select="'1'" />

    <xsl:variable name="values" select="$mappingNode/item[@key = $testVariable]" />

    <xsl:variable name="variable1" select="$values/@v1" />
    <xsl:variable name="variable2" select="$values/@v2" />
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

In fact, once you've got the values variable, you may not even need separate variable1 and variable2 variables. You could just use $values/@v1 and $values/@v2 instead.