Creating UNIX timestamp with XSLT2.0 (Saxon)

Creating timestamps is a quite often used requirement. If you start googling for how to create one in XSLT, you find exotic solutions. Today I set out to find an elegant one using XSLT extension functions.
If you take a look at the Java API, and in particular java.util.Date, you will see a method getTime() which returns exactly what I need.

long getTime()
Returns the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT represented by this Date object.

Now let's see at a simple input XML containing products. For each product we want to generate a timestamp while processing each product node.

<products>
  <product>
    This is a complex node
  </product>
  <product>
    This is a complex node
  </product>  
</products>

To understand how extension functions with Saxon can be used, take a look here. In this case we really need to construct new Date objects and invoke the method getTime on them. We bind the prefix date to the namespace java:java.util.Date. Next we can construct a new date object with date:new(). To invoke a method on any object you actually have to pass the context object to that method. So date:getTime(date:new()) is actually the java equivalent for new java.util.Date().getTime()

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  xmlns:nxp="http://www.nxp.com">
  
  <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:function name="nxp:getTimestamp">
    <xsl:value-of select="date:getTime(date:new())"  xmlns:date="java:java.util.Date"/>
  </xsl:function>

  <xsl:template match="product">
   <product processedTimestamp="{nxp:getTimestamp()}">
     <xsl:apply-templates/>
   </product>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

So when you execute that stylesheet you will end up with product tags having a new attribute like below:

<product processedTimestamp="1350635976117">
 ...
</product>