XQuery Example

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>