i have some data inside a dataSet outputted in xml e.g
<row>
    <id>1</id>
    <name>Mr. Smith</name>
    <date>2004-10-13T00:00:00.0000000+01:00</date>
    <duration>68<duration>
<row>
<row>
...
</row>

this is actually the data produced by a report page where the user can choose to deselect certain columns and also to change the order of the columns. i.e. my XSLT sheet loops through all the dataColumn nodes but can have no prior knowledge of the dataType of a column or whether to employ a custom XsltArgumentList object as the column positions are dynamic.

basically my xml above would need special formatting with C# so that I can display the date in the format "dd/MM/yy" and convert the duration from mins to the format "h:mm:ss". In C# I realise that I can use an XsltArgumentList to reference a custom object to do this but I need to dynamically interpret whether a column is of type 'Mins' or 'DateTime' in order to then dynamically perform my data formatting. any ideas if this is possible with XSLT?

XSLT 2.0 is full of features that allow you to match elements and attributes based on their type, but unfortunately there's very little help for this in 1.0.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

the way i see it then, i will have to manually loop through each row of my dataTable and reformat the values how I want them first. this way the data values are guaranteed to be correct so I can just pass the resulting xml to the stylesheet without worrying.

the only downside of this is the performance of iterating through my dataTable as opposed to just called dataSet.WriteXml()

would you agree?