RE: attribute based sorting

> <COLUMN NAME="Join_date">28-Oct-1987</COLUMN>
> 
> date format will be in DD-MMM-DDDD, what is the good approach 
> to sort this kind of dates.
> 

This seems to be a classic case where you should be using a pipeline
architecture: a series of transformations. First transform your data to
"clean" XML, that is, to

<Join_date>1987-10-27</Join_date>

and then the real processing all becomes much easier. The advantage of
splitting the transformation into phases is that the "clean-up" phase is
reusable, and independent of the subsequent processing you want to perform.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay