Date Arithmetics in XSLT 2

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:59:40 -0400

Now here’s something I didn’t know: XSLT 2 and XPath actually support date arithmetic! Took me a while to figure it out, but here’s how it works.

First, all your dates will have to be in ISO-8601 format. For dates only it looks like this: YYYY-MM-DD and for dates and times, like this: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:SS.sssZ. There’s a few other formats, but these are the ones that probably cover all use cases.

In order to make use of all the functions regarding date and time, the values will have to be converted into the appropriate types. They data types are defined in the XMLSchema namespace http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema and are:

Building a CMS with XML, XSLT, Ant, and ImageMagik

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:37:30 -0400

Not so long ago a freelance client approached me with some updates for their website. The site has been growing organically since 2000 and therefore was a big mess. Several attempts to port the site to a CMS driven system failed largely because those CMS systems are usually to complex for our needs (Typo3) or not flexible enough (Joomla, WordPress). So as I was faced with updates to all the updates including image updates which in turn needed thumbnails to be generated. The same day I stumbled randomly over the xsl:result-document function in XSLT 2.0 which allows you to transform a single XML file into several output files. That sparked an idea with me: why not use that to build a CMS system using XML technologies? I’ve toyed around with Cocoon a couple of years ago but that was not what I was looking for. So I looked for other technologies…

XML on ilikeorangutans

Date Arithmetics in XSLT 2

Building a CMS with XML, XSLT, Ant, and ImageMagik