Re: Re: A proposal:xsl:result-document asynchronous at

Francis,

> timestamp, randomNumber and interaction with unsafe, non-idempotent
> web-services would be my favourite "unclean" features.

Note that a side-effect-free version of timestamp is available in
XPath 2.0: current-dateTime(). During the course of a single
transformation, current-dateTime() will always return the same
dateTime.

I wonder what we can do about random number generation. I think that
having a function like random(seed?) would be possible, with it
returning the same random number for a given seed. That would allow
you to do:

  <xsl:for-each select="foo">
    <xsl:sort select="random(position())" data-type="number" />
    ...
  </xsl:for-each>

to get the <foo> elements in a random order, which would seem to be
the most frequent requirement for a random() function.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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