Hi,

I am experiencing a strange error in IE 6.0 when I run an XPATH expression with the translate function inside it.

In Firefox the code works fine but IE is throwing an error. I would appreciate if anyone could point me in the right direction about how to fix this.


I have to use the translate function to remove the hyphen "-" from the @date values - <Issue date="2008-01-01"> - so that I can do a >= or <= comparison with the dates passed in (20080101 - 20080301)

This is the XPTAH Expression:

numFromVal = 20080101
numToVal = 20080301


"Media/Vehicle/RateCards/RateCard[@id = '" + ratecardId + "' and @name = '" + ratecardName + "']/Ads/Ad/Issues/Issue[translate(@date,'-','')>=" + numFromVal + " and translate(@date,'-','')<=" + numToVal + "]/Insertion[@ordered]"

"Media/Vehicle/RateCards/RateCard[@id = '2547' and @name = '2008']/Ads/Ad/Issues/Issue[translate(@date,'-','')>=20080101 and translate(@date,'-','')<=20080301]/Insertion[@ordered]"


XML
---
<Issues>
<Issue date="2008-01-01">
<Insertion/>
</Issue>
<Issue date="2008-05-01">
<Insertion ordered="1499" materialFrom="Materials to follow" issueDate="2008-02-06 1:45:32 PM" changed="0" freq="0" ad="0" manrate="0" pos="0" rcd="0"/>
</Issue>
</Issues>
---

I would appreciate if someone could shed some light. Is there a work around this problem? Has anyone experienced this problem before?

________________________________

This is the full error I get:

name: "TypeError"
message: "Object doesn't support this property or method"
number: -2146827850
description: "Object doesn't support this property or method"

Unknown method.

Media/Vehicle/RateCards/RateCard[@id = '2547' and @name = '2008']/Ads/Ad/Issues/Issue[-->translate(@<--date,'-','')>=20080101 and translate(@date,'-','')<=20080301]/Insertion[@ordered]


Cheers

C

Can you post the code you are actually running - iexplore is saying that the 'method you are calling' doesn't exist - so what method are you calling?

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

I forget exactly when the defaults changed, but at one time the default language for selectNodes() was not W3C XPath 1.0 but an older Microsoft variant of XPath. You can set the language to XPath by setting the SelectionLanguage property of the IXMLDOMDocument node (using SetProperty()).

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

If you are using MSXML 3 and the methods selectNodes or selectSingleNode then you first need to call
  xmlDocumentInstance.setPoperty('SelectionLanguage' , 'XPath')
in J(ava)script respectively
  xmlDocumentInstance.setProperty "SelectionLanguage", "Path"
in VBScript before you can use XPath 1.0 expressions.

I would like to thank you for your reply.

I will make the changes suggested to the selectSingleNode() and see if they fix the problem.

Thanks

CP

Just a quick question.

Is there another way to build this XPATH without using the XPATH translate() function?

If there is I would like to use it since the selectSingleNode() javascript method is part of a javascript library I am using and if I change it something can break elsewhere?

Cheers

CP

I wouldn't advise you to use the old Microsoft XPath dialect (which IIRC they called "XSL patterns"). It's obsolete and it's almost impossible to find documentation on it. Remember that we're talking about a language that was around for a year from 1998 until it was superseded in 1999. There won't be many people who can help you with it. Also, from my distant memories of it, I suspect it doesn't have the functionality you need.

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

I think you need the translate function to strip the '-' character from your date values. I don't see any reason not to use it and attempts to avoid it might require other XPath functions.
And setting xmlDocumentInstance.setProperty('SelectionLanguage ', 'XPath') does not hurt with IE 6 and IE 7. The point is as long as you don't set the SelectionLanguage to XPath your arguments to selectSingleNode and selectNodes are not interpreted as XPath expressions and you will always run into problems as you think you are using XPath but it is a predecessor of that language.

Thanks a lot to everyone.

Maybe I will create a function locally that uses the setProperty('SelectionLanguage', 'XPath'). That way, I will not have to change the javascript library.

Cheers

CP