THE XML REVOLUTION - TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

Path expressions

The simplest kind of query is just an XPath 2.0 expression.

A simple path expression looks like:

document("recipes.xml")//recipe[title="Ricotta Pie"]//ingredient[@amount]

the result is all simple ingredients used to prepare Ricotta Pie in the recipe collection
the result is given as a list of XML fragments, each rooted with an ingredient element
the order of the fragments respects the document order (order matters! - as opposed to SQL)

The initial context for the path expression is given by document("recipes.xml") (similarly to XPointer).

Some XQuery specific extension of XPath: