Retrieving a list of media in umbraco

Question

I'm just starting to play with the XSLT system in umbraco where I was hoping to produce a macro which listed all the media under a specific media directory. I have come across umbraco.library:GetMedia but, frankly, I have no idea what to pass to it in order to get a list of items. The API docs at http://umbraco.org/apiDocs/html/M_umbraco_library_GetMedia.htm seem to suggest that what I probably want is to look up a node (how?) and then pass it in with

umbraco.library:GetMedia(<some node id>, true)

How would I go about getting that initial node id?

Subsequently would something like this work?

<xsl:for-each select="umbraco.library:GetMedia(<SOMEMAGIC>, 'true')">
    <li>
        <a href="{umbraco.library:NiceUrl(@id)}">
            <xsl:value-of select="@nodeName"/>
        </a>
    </li>
</xsl:for-each>

Answer 1

Thanks to some great help from the folks over at in the umbraco forums I figured it out. The thread is here and the solution is basically this XSLT

<xsl:for-each select="umbraco.library:GetMedia($currentPage/data [@alias='mediaDir'], 'true')/node">
 <li>
   <xsl:choose>
     <xsl:when test="umbraco.library:GetMedia(@id, 'false')/data [@alias = 'umbracoFile']">
    <a><xsl:attribute name="href">
     <xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:GetMedia(@id, 'false')/data [@alias = 'umbracoFile']"/>
       </xsl:attribute>
        <xsl:value-of select="@nodeName"/>
    </a>
     </xsl:when>
     <xsl:otherwise>
      <!--Do something with the directory-->
     </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </li>
</xsl:for-each>

coupled with a media picker control on the page.

Answer 2

Here's the same code but updated to work with Umbraco 4.5 or later:

<xsl:variable name="images" select="umbraco.library:GetMedia($currentPage/mediaDir, 1)" />

<xsl:for-each select="$images/*">
 <li>
   <xsl:choose>
     <xsl:when test="string(local-name()) = 'Image'">
       <a>
         <xsl:attribute name="href">
           <xsl:value-of select="./umbracoFile"/>
         </xsl:attribute>
         <xsl:value-of select="@nodeName"/>
       </a>
     </xsl:when>
     <xsl:otherwise>
      <!--Do something with the directory-->
     </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </li>
</xsl:for-each>