XSLT: Transform Date and Time Elements into nc:DateTime

While NIEM practitioners tend to merge Date and Time elements together into single nc:DateTime elements, we often find that the outside world separates these into two fields in their XML data packages.  For example, if someone were to use Java XForms or Microsoft InfoPath to capture data in an electronic form, it is common to separate these out into their component parts.

For example, assume a NIBRS report form exists and has discrete date and time values.  Using XSLT to merge these is quite simple and can be done using the concat() function as show here:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet 
    version="1.0" 
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:ns="SomeNibrsOffenseReportNamespace"
    exclude-result-prefixes="ns">
    
    <xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
    
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:variable name="sInputSchema" select="."/>
        
        <OffenseReportDocument xmlns="SomeNiemOffenseReportNamespace" xmlns:j="http://niem.gov/niem/domains/jxdm/4.0" xmlns:nc="http://niem.gov/niem/niem-core/2.0">
          <j:Offense>
            <nc:ActivityDate>
              <nc:DateTime>
                <xsl:value-of select="concat(string($sInputSchema/ns:NibrsForm/ns:OffenseDate), 'T', string(sInputSchema/ns:NibrsForm/ns:OffenseTime))"/>
              </nc:DateTime>
            </nc:ActivityDate>
          </j:Offense>
        </OffenseReportDocument>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

In the above example, the concat() function allows us to merge the date (e.g. ‘2010-01-01’), the letter ‘T’, and the time (e.g. ‘12:00:00’) into a single string which in turn can be evaluated as a nc:dateTime element. 

1-13-10 – Edit for typo