RE: [xsl] The Perils of Sudden Type-Safety in XPath 2.0

["Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> Hmm... Interestingly in the light of what I said above, this 
> seems to work if version="2.0" but not if version="1.0".

Yes. It's a bug in the spec, which has been pointed out and is being
corrected, but it seems I implemented the spec as written before I
noticed it! This is why it's a good idea to implement specs before they
are frozen.

The corrected spec says that in backwards compatibility mode, the cast
is only attempted where the target type is double or string. That
catches all the 1.0 functions.

In 2.0, you always get a cast to the required type when the supplied
value is an untyped node (that is, a node from a schema-less document). 

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 


> 
> The signature for string-pad() is:
> 
>   string-pad($padString as xs:string, $padCount as xs:integer)
>     as xs:string?
> 
> It works if version="2.0" because the type of the value of 
> the @indent attribute is xdt:anyAtomicType, and when you pass 
> a value of type xdt:anyAtomicType as an argument to a 
> function it just gets converted automatically to the required 
> type for the argument. So in this case the xdt:anyAtomicType 
> value from the indent attribute gets converted to an xs:integer.
> 
> On the other hand, if version="1.0" and the backwards 
> compatibility flags apply then a numeric required type for 
> the argument entails converting the argument to a xs:double 
> value. As you've found, the xs:double value then can't be 
> automatically converted to an integer, which is why you need 
> the explicit cast. This isn't an issue with the XPath 1.0 
> functions because they all expect doubles, but as you've 
> found, several of the new functions only accept integers.
> 
> (FWIW, I thought that floor(), ceiling() or round() might 
> help here, but they all return doubles, I think for 
> compatibility with XPath 1.0, so that they can return NaN.)
> 
> So the fix here, if you want to avoid declaring and using the 
> XML Schema namespace, actually seems to be to use 
> version="2.0" rather than version="1.0".
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Jeni
> 
> ---
> Jeni Tennison
> http://www.jenitennison.com/
> 
> 
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