I am trying to make a macro/xslt that has a 'date' and 'formatString' parameter as input parameters to emit a date string in any format I like according to the .NET format string syntax (e.g. "dd MMMM", ..).

The invocation of the macro looks as follows (e.g. for @createDate):

<div class="Date">
  <umbraco:Macro Alias="FormattedDateTime"
                 date='<umbraco:Item field="createDate" runat="server" />'
                 format="dd MMMM"
                 runat="server" />
</div>

My XSLT looks as follows:

...
<xsl:output method="xml" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

<xsl:variable name="date" select="/macro/date" />
<xsl:variable name="formatString" select="/macro/formatString" /> 

<xsl:template match="/">

  <xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:FormatDateTime($date, $formatString)"/>

</xsl:template>
...




The problem I have is how to pass a umbraco 'date' attribute/property to the macro. E.g. what should I use as the parameter type for 'date'. It currently is set to 'text' which doesn't seem right to me.
With the above code nothing is returned in the XSLT because $date apparently is not holding the date that I had expected to be passed with the umbraco:item parameter. When I output $date in the XSLT  file it shows the following:
<umbraco:Item field="createDate" runat="server"></umbraco:Item>
Very strange!
Anyone can help me on this?
Thanks.