Saxon Documentation
Full Contents
About Saxon
Changes in this Release
Licensing
Using XSLT 2.0
Using XQuery
Handling Source Documents
XML Schema Processing
XPath API for Java
Saxon on .NET
Extensibility
	Introduction
	Integrated extension functions
	Writing reflexive extension functions in Java
»	Converting Arguments to Java Extension Functions
	Converting the Result of a Java Extension Function
	Writing extension functions for .NET
	Converting Arguments to .NET Extension Functions
	Converting the Result of a .NET Extension Function
	Writing XSLT extension instructions
	Customizing Serialization
	Implementing a collating sequence
	Localizing numbers and dates
	Writing a URI Resolver for Input Files
	Writing a URI Resolver for Output Files
Saxon Extensions
Sample Saxon Applications
The Saxon SQL Extension
XSLT Elements
XPath 2.0 Expression Syntax
Function Library
Standards Conformance

Converting Atomic Values

This section describes the conversions that occur when calling a method that expects an atomic value, such as a String or a boolean.

If the supplied value is a node, then it is atomized.

If the supplied value contains more than item and only a single item is expected, an error is reported. There is no implicit extraction of the first value (as happened in earlier Saxon releases).

If the supplied value is an empty sequence, then a null value is passed. However, if the required type is a primitive Java type such as int or bool, then passing an empty sequence will result in a type error.

In other cases, the supported conversions are as follows. Italicized names are Saxon-specific classes in package net.sf.saxon.value.

Supplied type	Required type
boolean	BooleanValue, Boolean
dateTime	DateTimeValue, Date
date	DateValue, Date
decimal	DecimalValue, BigDecimal, Double, Float
double	DoubleValue, Double
duration	DurationValue
float	FloatValue, Float, Double
integer, long, int	IntegerValue, BigInteger, BigDecimal, Long, Integer, Double, Float
short	IntegerValue, BigInteger, BigDecimal, Long, Integer, Short, Double, Float
byte	IntegerValue, BigInteger, BigDecimal, Long, Integer, Short, Byte, Double, Float
string	StringValue, (String, CharSequence)
anyURI	AnyURIValue, java.net.URI, java.net.URL, (String, CharSequence)
QName	QNameValue, javax.xml.namespace.QName

A required type of one of the Java primitive types such as int or bool is treated as equivalent to the corresponding boxed type (Integer or Boolean), except that with the boxed types, an empty sequence can be supplied in the function call and is translated to a Java null value as the actual argument.

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