RE: [xsl] Release Date vs. Highlight Until Date

Subject: RE: [xsl] Release Date vs. Highlight Until Date
From: "Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 09:37:01 +0100
> Each news record has a "release date" value.  I am not sure 
> of the format but
> hopefully my code could handle multiple formats, or if there 
> is a standard for
> date formatting in XML maybe the CMS uses that.

I would recommend working with the ISO 8601 format which is also used by XML
Schema - this will maximize the chances for interoperability. This is
YYYY-MM-DD.

It's simplest to pass the date to the stylesheet as a parameter. If you
can't do that, another approach is to access it using the document()
function with a URL such as local://date which you intercept in an
XmlResolver, returning an XML document containing the current date.

For date arithmetic, e.g. calculating the date 5 days from now, look at the
EXSLT library at www.exslt.org

Of course it all gets easier with XSLT 2.0 but you appear to have given
yourself platform constraints.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/


> On a main 
> page I need to list
> the latest 5 article titles based on this "release date", 
> with links to the
> article content.  That would seem like a simple sort with 
> some kind of break
> condition after 5 loops (though I'm not even sure how to do 
> that), but the
> complication is that each record also has a "highlight until" 
> date; if the
> current system date is before the "highlight until" date, 
> those highlighted
> records need to appear at the top of the list, which should still be
> constrained to 5 articles.
> 
> It seems that XSL doesn't inherently know what date it is, so 
> either my CMS
> vendor should already be passing that or I need to figure out 
> how to pass this
> as a parameter to my XSL.  I'm also not finding many web 
> references to this
> specific kind of date logic.  Based on these I'm wondering if 
> a .NET component
> is the right way to go, but since the data is already in XML 
> I think I would
> prefer XSL if possible/not too complicated.
> 
> Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>    -John

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