Is the @ symbol always necessary in the SharePoint ItemStyle XSLT?

Question

I'm working on a project in which I've made a new webpart which inherits the CQWP. In the codebehind I send some additional values, which isn't present in the lists (meaning there are no columns containing these values) I'm displaying using this webpart.

Is it then necessary to use the @ symbol in order to fetch these values?

Answer 1

The CQWP renders the datatable columns as attributes of the row element so you would use the @ symbol to reference them in your XSLT as opposed to parameters or variables referenced using the $ symbol and elements referenced without any symbol

Answer 2

Are you passing additional parameters using the ModifyXsltArgumentList (or similar)? If so, just add the <xsl:param name="YourParamName"/> near the top of the xslt file and you can just get to the parameter names with $YourParamName.