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[xsl] An empty sequence is not allowed as the first argument ...

2006-06-02 13:02:49
I've written an XSLT function to format dates fetched from a database. This 
worked well until I pulled some records with NULL values for the date I wished 
to format. When my stylesheet encountered this element, Saxon emitted this 
error message and ended with a fatal error:

Fatal Error! An empty sequence is not allowed as the first argument of 
ck:std-date-string-fmt()

You may well ask, "What did you expect?" The answer is that I was not expecting 
anything. I was happily ignorant of the lurking danger. I tried to supply a 
default empty string value for the parameter that causes the function to choke 
when no value is supplied, only to be upbraided by Saxon telling me that 
default values are not permitted in function parameters.

(I had slipped in an xsl:choose to catch the empty-sting cases, but without 
being able to assign a default value, that failed.)

Does an empty sequence have some kind of xs:type that I could cast to an 
xs:string, and if so, how is it done? If not, how do I handle cases when no 
data comes from my database?
-- 
Charles Knell
cknell(_at_)onebox(_dot_)com - email

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