I'm actually working with XSLT in BizTalk 2006, which unfortunately doesn't 
support XLST 2.0 with all its nice date-time functions. But I was able to 
write some scripting functions that do string comparisions, format my 
date-time values as sortable date-time strings, and call my custom min 
date-time functions from XSLT.

Thanks,
Zoe

"Martin Honnen" <mahotrash@y...> wrote in message 
news:OwSuXZv7HHA.3716@T......
> Zoe Hart wrote:
>
>> I've written a function to convert a date to number of ticks, but since
>> finding the minimum date involves comparing an individual date (or number 
>> of
>> ticks) to a node set, I'm not sure how to get the whole node set 
>> converted
>> to number of ticks in order for the comparison to work.
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>
> Can you use XSLT? I don't think pure XPath 1.0 suffices. You can do e.g.
>   number(translate(value, '-T:', ''))
> to get a number your could compare, not even needing a function to convert 
> to ticks but the problem with applying that function to a node-set with 
> your original minimum approach remains.
>
> XPath 2.0 could do it nicely, besides having xs:dateTime support for 
> comparison operators and the min functio I think you can even apply 
> functional expressions to node-sets as the last part of an XPath 
> expression so there you could do
>
> min(/test/order/item_info/item/somedata/value/xs:dateTime(.))
>
>
> -- 
>
> Martin Honnen --- MVP XML
> http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/