Re: Release Date vs. Highlight Until Date

Thanks for your suggestions. I am not sure the CMS vendor supports XSL 2.0. After looking more at the system I think I'll implement an XSL extension to
retrieve sysdate instead of passing it everywhere I need it. I've been
digging deeper and found that the dates are stored as yyyyMMddTHHmmss, which I
don't think is xs:datetime format but should be pretty easy to parse/sort, or
convert to another format for parsing/sorting.

<xsl:template match="items">
 <xsl:apply-template select="item">
   <xsl:sort select="@release-date"/>
 </xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:template>

Therefore, since a single XML document contains both the IA and the content, I
think I can do something like (half code, half psuedo-code):

<xsl:variable name="sysdate" select="me:function" />

Is it possible to write a single XPath query that merges the equivalent of the
two XPath queries below (excuse my attempt at syntax) such that an
xsl:for-each with that as select will first process the elements matching the
first condition, then those matching the second condition?

//item[@highlight_date &lt; $sysdate]

//item

Also, to ensure I don't get the same record twice, do I just reverse the first
condition in the second condition?  Something like:

//item[@highlight_date &lt; $sysdate]

//item[@highlight_date &gt;= $sysdate]

<xsl:template match="item">
 <xsl:if test="position() &lt; 6">
   <xsl:apply-templates/>
 </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

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I think that for performance I wouldn't want this combined query to return
more than 5 records. It seems like this would have to do with position(), but
that can only apply before the sort, and I want the 5 records after sort. Any
suggestions? maybe a recursive function? anyway, I have to consider
alternatives for performance.

Then within the xsl:for-each I need to sort such that those records matched by
the highlight_date query appear first - any suggestions there?
Now you can can all see how lost I am.

best,
-Rob

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Thanks again,

-John