RE: [xsl] format-date and xsd:date

["Michael Kay" <mhk@xxxxxxxxx>]

XML Schema offers additional data types such as gYear and gYearMonth which
appear to be what you are looking for; however, there is very little direct
support for them in XPath functions and operators. Frankly, I think that the
proportion of the schema type system and the XPath function library given
over to handling of the calendar is already quite disproportionate.

If you do want to use the gYearMonth data type, you can write your own
function f:format-gYearMonth which converts the value to a date:

xs:date(concat($gYM, '-00'))

and then applies format-date() to it.

Michael Kay



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce D'Arcus [mailto:bdarcus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 10 August 2004 02:52
> To: XSL-List@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [xsl] format-date and xsd:date
> 
> I'm not really sure where this question/comment ought to go, 
> but since 
> it came in the midst of working with XSTL 2, this seems a good place.
> 
> The data-typing-related support in XSLT 2 is based on XML 
> Schema.  So, 
> in both cases, a "date" is defined as YYYY-MM-DD, and 
> anything else is 
> invalid.  While this makes sense when you consider YYYY/MM/DD, 
> MM-DD-YYYY and so forth, why can't all of the following be 
> valid dates?
> 
> YYYY-MM-DD
> YYYY-MM
> YYYY
> 
> This comes out of working with bibliographic data, where one 
> typically 
> has issue dates of year-only, sometimes year-and-month, and only 
> occasionally the full "date" as understood by xs:date.
> 
> This means I have to define my own schema patterns if I write 
> a schema, 
> and my own equivalents to handle the stuff in XSLT 2 if I 
> don't want to 
> select the substrings.
> 
> Does nobody else find this a problem?  Is there any prospect 
> to change 
> it?
> 
> I'm just having a hard time understanding how I can code a schema to 
> enforce dates of the sort I deal with and also get the 
> advantage of the 
> datatyping and XSLT 2 date formatting.
> 
> If I do:
> 
> <date year="1999" month="03"/>
> 
> ... that's easy to control and flexible, but there's no format-month 
> function (in Saxon 8 at least).
> 
> Bruce