Let's learn some basic XQuery by looking at an example.
The XML Example Document
We will use the following XML document in the examples below.
"books.xml":
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<bookstore>
<book category="COOKING">
<title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
<author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>30.00</price>
</book>
<book category="CHILDREN">
<title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
<book category="WEB">
<title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title>
<author>James McGovern</author>
<author>Per Bothner</author>
<author>Kurt Cagle</author>
<author>James Linn</author>
<author>Vaidyanathan Nagarajan</author>
<year>2003</year>
<price>49.99</price>
</book>
<book category="WEB">
<title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
<author>Erik T. Ray</author>
<year>2003</year>
<price>39.95</price>
</book>
</bookstore>
How to Select Nodes From "books.xml"?
Functions
XQuery uses functions to extract data from XML documents.
The doc() function is used to open the "books.xml" file:
doc("books.xml")
Path Expressions
XQuery uses path expressions to navigate through elements in an XML document.
The following path expression is used to select all the title elements in the "books.xml" file:
doc("books.xml")/bookstore/book/title
(/bookstore selects the bookstore element, /book selects all the book elements under the bookstore element, and /title selects all the title elements under each book element)
The XQuery above will extract the following:
<title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
<title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
<title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title>
<title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
Predicates
XQuery uses predicates to limit the extracted data from XML documents.
The following predicate is used to select all the book elements under the bookstore element that have a price element with a value that is less than 30:
doc("books.xml")/bookstore/book[price<30]
The XQuery above will extract the following:
<book category="CHILDREN">
<title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
