Hi Everybody,

First of all let me say hi, i'm new to the boards so go easy on me.

I've searched through the forum looking for an answer to a niggling problem I have with an XSL stylesheet. I receive a <startDate> through my XML and I would like to display this date as a count down. For example 99days 8hours 9minutes - until next event.

I do not need my countdown to be a 'live' countdown (like you would see in DHTML or similar.) As the page loads I simply want to attach the current date and time to a variable so I can calculate accordingly.

Searching the internet has uncovered a few options (http://exslt.org/date/index.html) but after experimenting with them I have been unable to fix this problem. Has anyone got a quick fix??

Thanks in advance

devMc

If you need access to the current date during your transform then there are a number of options:

• Pass in the current date as a parameter
• Use an extension function, how you do this is processor specific, in .NET you can use C# for example
• Use the current-date() function (XSLT 2.0 only)

If that's not what you need can you be a bit more specific?

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

What have you tried exactly?

Are you using XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0, in which case you should be able to use the days-from-duration(), hours-from-duration() and minutes-from-duration() functions.

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

Well now, days-from-duration(). Exactly what I'm looking for. Tried a few things ...
Sharepoint list with a single item of historical date, say 2006-01-02 (yyyy-mm-dd) for example. Can display the item itself fine. Want to do a calculation using days-from-duration() within the XSLT that runs through a webpart.

Want to display Integer value on a Dashboard. Without the calculation, this line makes the output:
<xsl:value-of select="LIRDate"/>

I've added this to the stylesheet as a variable:
<xsl:variable name="TheDate" select="LIRDate"/>

Wanted to do this:
<xsl:value-of select="days-from-duration($TheDate)"/>

but I get a:

Failed setting processor stylesheet : 0x80004005 : 'days-from-duration' is not a valid XSLT or XPath function. -->days-from-duration($TheDate)<--

Wow, I'd better run out and buy another Wrox Book!

days-from-duration() is an XPath 2.0 function, looks as if you called it from a 1.0 processor.

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

I have searched the internet for a very long time and I know you cannot get the current date in XSLT 1.0 but you can in XSLT 2.0. I found forums posting the function below:

<xsl:value-of select="current_date()"/>

But I get errors. Can someone tell me how to use the functions in XSLT 2.0? Am I missing something some declarations at the top of the XSL stylesheet? If you can post some sample code it will be very helpful since I cannot find any. What I want to do is get the current date and save it into a variable so that I can use it later in the transformation by comparing with dates in the XML. Someone suggested using javascript to retrieve the current date but how do I it.

Many thanks in advance.

If you looked in this forum, a few posts back in this thread, you'd have seen the correct format, current-date(). In general XSLT uses the dash (-) rather than the underscore (_) to separate words in function names.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)