XSLT Sort elements using dictionary - xslt

Question

I have an XML which is a list of countries with their codes:
<Countries>
<Country Code="DE" />
<Country Code="FR" />
</Countries>
I apply XSLT to this XML to transform into HTML and I want elements to be sorted alphabetically by country name rather than code.
So I defined CountryCodeDictionaryEN variable which is a dictionary of country codes and names. It works fine in <xsl:value-of /> but not inside <xsl:sort />
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt">
<xsl:variable name="CountryCodeDictionaryEN">
<item key="Germany"
value="DE" />
<item key="France"
value="FR" />
... all other countries ...
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:template match="/">
<table>
<xsl:for-each select="Countries/Country">
<xsl:sort select="msxsl:node-set($CountryCodeDictionaryEN)/item[#value = #Code]/#key"/>
<tr>
<td>
<xsl:variable name="Code" select="#Code"/>
<xsl:value-of select="msxsl:node-set($CountryCodeDictionaryEN)/item[#value = $Code]/#key"/>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Answer 1

item[#value = #Code] compares the value attribute of an item against the Code attribute of the same item. Since the item elements don't have a Code attribute, the select expression will always result in an empty node set, so every node will get the same (empty string) sort key. And since xsl:sort is stable (items with the same sort key value retain their original relative ordering) the overall effect is no sorting.
You need to use current() to "break out" of the predicate and refer to the node being sort-ed:
<xsl:sort select="msxsl:node-set($CountryCodeDictionaryEN)
/item[#value = current()/#Code]/#key"/>
This will compare the value of the item against the Code of the Country.