Sitecore item multilistfield XPATH builder - xpath

Question

I'm trying to count with XPATH Builder in Sitecore, the number of items which have more than 5 values in a multilist field.
I cannot count the number of "|" from raw values, so I can say I am stuck.
Any info will be helpful.
Thank you.

Answer 1

It's been a long time since I used XPath in Sitecore - so I may have forgotten something important - but:
Sadly, I don't think this is possible. XPath Builder doesn't really run proper XPath. It understands a subset of things that would evaluate correctly in a full XPath parser.
One of the things it can't do (on the v8-initial-release instance I have to hand) is be able to process XPath that returns things that are not Sitecore Items. A query like count(/sitecore/content/*) should return a number - but if you try to run that using either the Sitecore Query syntax, or the XPath syntax options you get an error:
If you could run such a query, then your answer would be based on an expression like this, to perform the count of GUIDs referenced by a specific field:
string-length( translate(/yourNodePath/#yourFieldName, "abcdefg1234567890{}-", "") ) + 1
(Typed from memory, as I can't run a test - so may not be entirely correct)
The translate() function replaces any character in the first string with the relevant character in the second. Hence (if I've typed it correctly) that expression should remove all your GUIDs and just leave the pipe-separator characters. Hence one plus the length of the remaining string is your answer for each Item you need to process.
But, as I say, I don't think you can actually run that from Query Builder...
These days, people tend to use Sitecore PowerShell Extensions to write ad-hoc queries like this. It's much more flexible and powerful - so if you can use that, I'd recommend it.
Edited to add: This question got a bit stuck in my head - so if you are able to use PowerShell, here's how you might do it:
Assuming you have declared where you're searching, what MultiList field you're querying, and what number of selections Items must exceed:
$root = "/sitecore/content/Root"
$field = "MultiListField"
$targetNumber = 3
then the "easy to read" code might look like this:
foreach($item in Get-ChildItem $root)
{
$currentField = Get-ItemField $item -ReturnType Field -Name $field
if($currentField)
{
$count = $currentField.Value.Split('|').Count
if($count -gt $targetNumber)
{
$item.Paths.Path
}
}
}
It iterates the children of the root item you specified, and gets the contents of your field. If that field name had a value, it then splits that into GUIDs and counts them. If the result of that count is greater than your threshold it returns the item's URI.
You can get the same answer out of a (harder to read) one-liner, which would look something like:
Get-ChildItem $root | Select-Object Paths, #{ Name="FieldCount"; Expression={ Get-ItemField $_ -ReturnType Field -Name $field | % { $_.Value.Split('|').Count } } } | Where-Object { $_.FieldCount -gt $targetNumber } | % { $_.Paths.Path }
(Not sure if that's the best way to write that - I'm no expert at PowerShell syntax - but it gives the same results as far as I can see)