Basic- Making a template call / Date Arithmetic

presack · August 3rd, 2007, 12:46 PM

I am attempting to do some date arithmetic to assist in some Conditional Formatting on a Sharepoint web site. Disappointingly, this is not straightforward because of the format the dates are returned in. My question (which likely is one of the stupider ones on here) is simply, how exactly do I call a template?

I found a very good template for performing Date Arithmetic here:
http://www.exslt.org/date/functions/...ifference.html

The template syntax is shown to be:
<xsl:call-template name="date:difference">
   <xsl:with-param name="start" select="string" />
   <xsl:with-param name="end" select="string" />
</xsl:call-template>

In a sample xsl file, I have:

=======================
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:date="http://exslt.org/dates-and-times" extension-element-prefixes="date">
<xsl:import href="date.difference.template.xsl" />

<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
  <body>
  <h2>Date Arithmetic</h2>
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="date">
  <br />
  Date: <span style="color:#0000ff">
  <xsl:value-of select="."/>; This is a duration of
<xsl:call-template name="date:difference">
   <xsl:with-param name="start" select="." />
   <xsl:with-param name="end" select="'20070803T00:00:00'" />
</xsl:call-template>
        .</span>
  <br />
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>
================================

I have bought Beginning XML and attempting to get up-to-speed, but I think with just a little help I could get my date math implemented and move on to the other parts of my project, for which I also have a steep learning curve. Sorry for the complete newbie question.

presack

Processor: SharePoint 2003/IIS
Desktop OS: Windows XP

mhkay · August 3rd, 2007, 01:05 PM

There's nothing wrong with your call-template syntax, but the end date is missing hyphens, and I've no idea what format the start date is in. The spec that you cited indicates the permitted formats, I haven't looked at the implementation but it wouldn't surprise me if it does little error checking on the parameters.

Date arithmetic is of course built-in to XSLT 2.0 - but you'll still need to represent dates in ISO format.

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

presack · August 3rd, 2007, 01:33 PM

You are correct- I can't believe I missed that. The template does just return a " " string when it encounters an error.

To be honest with you, I am not sure exactly how SharePoint processes its XML. I currently have SharePoint 2003, but will soon have 2007. I will have to do some research to see if it will support XSLT 2.0 so that this will be easier.

Thanks for the quick reply,
presack