Issue with comparing dates

baseliner · December 4th, 2009, 05:37 AM

Hi - I have a function that I've defined in XSLT that converts a date that looks like 1/4/2010 (Jan 4, 2010) into the ISO format 20100104. This is what my function looks like:

Code:

	<xsl:function name="lbs:formatDateISO">
		<xsl:param name="varDate"/>
		<xsl:value-of select="number(concat(tokenize($varDate,'/')[3],substring('0',1,2 - string-length(tokenize($varDate,'/')[1])),tokenize($varDate,'/')[1],substring('0',1,2 - string-length(tokenize($varDate,'/')[2])),tokenize($varDate,'/')[2]))" /> 
	</xsl:function>

I then use this function in another function that filters for dates that aren't within a given startDate and endDate. I use the > operator to compare dates for this and this part isn't working correctly. For example, the following code shouldn't return anything (since 1/10/2010 is "less than" 1/15/2010 and hence the test should fail) but it does return -5:

Code:

				<xsl:if test="lbs:formatDateISO('1/10/2010') &gt; lbs:formatDateISO('1/15/2010') ">
					<xsl:value-of select="lbs:formatDateISO('1/10/2010') - lbs:formatDateISO('1/15/2010')"/>
				</xsl:if>

The fact that the difference of -5 was computed correctly seems to indicate that the conversion to a number is working OK from the lbs:formatDateISO function (I confirmed this by printing out the values from this function). So I'm guessing the problem is with the greater-than operator > not working as expected? Would appreciate any help. Thanks!

samjudson · December 4th, 2009, 06:03 AM

The conversion to a number only happens when you call the '-' operator. The '>' comparison operator will work quite happily on strings, were for example '2' > '15' is true.

To ensure the returned value of the function is a number you can add the 'as' attribute to the function declaration:

<xsl:function name="lbs:formatDateISO" as="xs:integer">

samjudson · December 4th, 2009, 06:12 AM

Just as a quick addendum the xpath number() function returns the number in IEEE notation, which was then being converted into a string. So get rid of the number() function and add the xs:integer type to the function and it works fine.

baseliner · December 4th, 2009, 06:17 AM

Aah, I see. I figured that using the number() function to convert the string into a number within the function would ensure that the return value of the function would be an integer. Guess not. I used the as="xs:integer" and it gave an error that it couldn't convert 2.0100104E7 to an integer so I removed the number() function and that did the trick. Thank you!

mhkay · December 4th, 2009, 06:22 AM

My own approach would be: instead of converting the date to a number 20100104, convert it first to the string "2010-01-04" and then to an xs:date. While converting to a number is fine for determining which date is the earlier, converting to xs:date will also open the door to a much wider set of computations, for example working out the difference between two dates as a number of days. For the same amount of effort you have therefore gained the ability to satisfy a wider range of possible future requirements.

By the way, it is always good practice to use the "as" attribute to declare the types of function parameters and the type of the result. This makes a very big difference to the ease of debugging this kind of problem, it should really be your universal coding practice.

baseliner · December 4th, 2009, 09:28 PM

Thanks Michael, that's a great idea to convert to xs:date! This also helped me compute a date that's offset from a given date by a given duration, which was my next step.. very cool! :)