Question

I’m creating a Excel xml workbook via xslt. One of the date fields is often NULL and I need to not insert anything into the cell when this is the case. At the moment even though I’m not specifying anything the value -146087 is being entered into the cell. This is then displayed as hashes as the cell is date formatted.

What can I put between the

<xsl:otherwise></xsl:otherswise>

tags?

Here’s the xslt…

<Cell>
  <Data ss:Type="DateTime">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="substring(EOI_StartDate, 0, 11)">
        <xsl:value-of select="substring(EOI_StartDate, 0, 11)"/>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>

      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </Data>
  <NamedCell ss:Name="_FilterDatabase"/>
</Cell>

Answer 1

It seems from your question that you want to produce:

<Data/>

in the case when the condition is not fulfilled.

The simplest way to do this is not to use <xsl:choose> but the simpler <xsl:if>:

<Data ss:Type="DateTime">
  <xsl:if test="substring(EOI_StartDate, 0, 11)">
    <xsl:value-of select="substring(EOI_StartDate, 0, 11)"/>
  </xsl:if>
</Data>

Or, in case you want to omit the <Data> element completely if the condition is not satisfied, then:

<xsl:if test="substring(EOI_StartDate, 0, 11)">
  <Data ss:Type="DateTime">
    <xsl:value-of select="substring(EOI_StartDate, 0, 11)"/>
  </Data>
</xsl:if>

Finally, if the <Data> element must stay there, but you don’t want it to be treated as date if the condition is not satisfied, do this:

<xsl:choose>
  <xsl:when test="substring(EOI_StartDate, 0, 11)">
    <Data ss:Type="DateTime">
            <xsl:value-of select="substring(EOI_StartDate, 0, 11)"/>
    </Data>
  </xsl:when>
  <xsl:otherwise>
    <Data ss:Type="String"> </Data>
  </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>