The awkward thing about RSS is the date format (rfc 822), it makes sorting a bit tricky. One way of simplifying sorting is to loop over the <item> tags and build a new nodeset with an extra unix-time or iso-time tag to represent the pubDate in a more sort-friendly format.
If you fetch the RSS feed using rxml:s insert-href or insert-cached-href tags it might be preferable to add the unix-timestamp in rxml instead of in xslt (since Roxens xslt-parser as far as I know don't have any time functions and you probably don't want to invoke several xsltransform passes) Here is one way of doing the unix-time replacement in rxml: ---- <?comment ### define a tag "rss" to parse a RSS feed ### ?> <define container="rss"> <?comment ## defines to build new item-nodeset with a unix-timestamp ## ?> <define container="newNode"> <append variable="var.newNodeSet" type="text/xml"> <item> <contents copy-of="item/*"/> <set variable="_.pubDate"><contents value-of="item/pubDate"/></set> <unixtime><date http-time="&_.pubDate;" type="unix" /></unixtime> </item> </append> </define> <define container="timeParser"> <set variable='_.feeditems'><contents copy-of="rss/channel/item" result-set=""/></set> <?comment ## loop over item:s and call newNode for each one ## ?> <emit source='values' variable='_.feeditems'> <newNode>&_.value:none;</newNode> </emit> </define> <?comment ### ger rss-feed from url or cached in db and pass it to timeParser define ## ?> <timeParser><insert cached-href="&_.feed;" quote="none" /></timeParser> <?comment ## the new nodeset is now available in the variable var.newNodeSet ## ?> &var.newNodeSet:none; </define> <rss feed="http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml"; /> ---- If you want to transform the new feed-nodeset with xslt you can now do: <xsltransform xsl="yourxsl.xsl" preparse="yes"><newNodeSet>&rss.newNodeSet:none;</newNodeSet></xsltransform> and in that templatefile have something like: <xsl:template match="newNodeSet"> <xsl:for-each select="//item"> <xsl:sort select="unixtime" data-type="number"/> <h3><xsl:value-of select="title"/></h3> <p> <xsl:value-of select="pubDate" />, <xsl:value-of select="description" /> </p> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:template> Haven't tested the xsl-parts but the rxml should work. Hope this helps /Peter >________________________________ > From: Christopher Howard <[email protected]> >To: Roxen <[email protected]> >Sent: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 9:15 PM >Subject: Roxen xslt and date filtering > > >Hi. I'm still an XSLT newbie, but I am trying to use some XSLT in Roxen >to transform an RSS feed into html. However, I want to do filtering >based on the date, e.g., only display five entries with the most recent >pubDate. Working from within a Roxen system, what are my options for >date sorting/filtering? > > >
