Re: Release Date vs. Highlight Until Date

Hi,

I am new to the list and XSL in general, so I apologize if this is the wrong
forum for this question.

I am also simplifying my problem as much as
possible. I am also still at a pretty high level, looking more into the
concepts than the code. While I would appreciate code examples, simple
suggestions of what tokens I should research or URLs with further information
would also be appreciated.

I am working with a CMS that stores both the
information architecture (like a directory structure) and content (like XML
files inside the directories) as XML which is transformed using XSL to HTML
for distribution to browsers. If what I'm trying to do becomes too
complicated for XML I can use pure .NET code, but I'm wondering what XSL
solutions might be possible.

Each news record has a "release date" value. I am not sure of the format but
hopefully my code could handle multiple formats, or if there is a standard for
date formatting in XML maybe the CMS uses that.

On a main page I need to list
the latest 5 article titles based on this "release date", with links to the
article content. That would seem like a simple sort with some kind of break
condition after 5 loops (though I'm not even sure how to do that), but the
complication is that each record also has a "highlight until" date; if the
current system date is before the "highlight until" date, those highlighted
records need to appear at the top of the list, which should still be
constrained to 5 articles.

It seems that XSL doesn't inherently know what date it is, so either my CMS
vendor should already be passing that or I need to figure out how to pass this
as a parameter to my XSL. I'm also not finding many web references to this
specific kind of date logic. Based on these I'm wondering if a .NET component
is the right way to go, but since the data is already in XML I think I would
prefer XSL if possible/not too complicated.

good luck,
-Rob

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-John