Hi, Sam

The current XML and XSLT versions don't handle dates very well. XSLT 2 is supposed to understand dates as first class citizens. For now, if we want to handle date semantics into our XML and XSLT documents, we need to create dates following the ISO 8601 specification. This basically means treating dates as strings on the format "YYYYMMDD".

The following XSL transformation fragment shows how we can acomplish that:

<xsl:if test="@discount_applies = 'Y'">

  <xsl:variable name="baseDate" select="20070928" />
  <xsl:variable name="itemDate" select="concat(substring(@date,7,4), substring(@date,4,2), substring(@date,1,2))" />

  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test ="$itemDate >= $baseDate"></xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
      <xsl:value-of select="discountvalue" />
      <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@disc_value - @mk_value" />
    </xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>

</xsl:if>

Just out of curiosity, when LINQ to XML is out, we will be able to handle dates more easily in .NET programs.