XPath tokenize() method not recognized by msxml3.dll - xpath

I'm attempting to use the tokenize method in a SelectNodes(" ") call, to filter some things out.
I have something along the lines of:
<nodes>
<node colors="RED,BLUE,YELLOW"/>
</nodes>
And my xpath is as such:
nodes/node[not(empty(tokenize("GREEN,YELLOW,PURPLE", ",") intersect tokenize(#colors, ",")))]
Simply, I've got two comma delimited list, one as an attribute, and one as a "filter" for the attributes. I want to select all nodes where #colors contains, somewhere, one of the words inside of "GREEN,YELLOW,PURPLE".
I thought I had the solution for it with that XPath, but it seems either:
A: I did something wrong, or
B: The version of XML DOM document I am using does not support tokenize()
The XPath above, in a SelectNodes( ) call will throw up an error message, saying msxml3.dll: Unknown method.", then pointing to the tokenize() method.
I tried doing setProperty("SelectionLanguage", "XPath"), but that did not seem to solve the issue either.
Is there any way for me to perform an equivalent XPath selection, without resorting to a bunch of and contains(#colors, "GREEN") and contains(#colors, "YELLOW")...?

As JLRishe says, msxml does not support XPath 2.0.
Depending on the environment that you are in there is probably third-party software you can use that supports either XPath 2.0 or XQuery 1.0 (which is a superset of XPath 2.0).
Microsoft's XML software is getting very dated and there has been little new development for 10 years now. It's time to consider alternatives.

Related

XPath fails because Namespace colon in Title

I'm generating an XML report, using the JDF standard for PDFs going into a printing workflow.
There are 3 "DPart" sections, and I can use an xPath query to recognize them, but I want to grab the "Separation" attribute of each "cip4:Part". I can also get a query to find that, but it does not distinguish between the multiple "DPart"s.
<DPart End="0" ID="0003" ParentRef="0002" Start="0">
<DPM>
<cip4:Root>
<cip4:Intent cip4:ProductType="ProductPart"/>
<cip4:Production>
<cip4:Resource>
<cip4:Part Separation="K1"/>
<cip4:Color cip4:ActualColorName="Black" cip4:ColorType="Normal">
</cip4:Resource>
<cip4:Resource>
<cip4:Part Separation="S1"/>**
<cip4:Color cip4:ActualColorName="Dieline" cip4:ColorType="Normal">
</cip4:Resource>
<cip4:Resource>
<cip4:ColorantControl ColorantOrder="K1 S1" ColorantParams="K1 S1"/>
</cip4:Resource>
<cip4:Resource>
<eg:InkCoverage>
<eg:InkCov eg:Mm2="0.000000" eg:Pct="0.000000" eg:Separation="K1"/>
<eg:InkCov eg:Mm2="182.337538" eg:Pct="0.721209" eg:Separation="S1"/>
</eg:InkCoverage>
</cip4:Resource>
</cip4:Production>
</cip4:Root>
</DPM>
</DPart>
I want to do something like:
/DPM[2]/*[name ()='cip4:Part'], but it's not working.
I'm in a low-code pre-press environment (Esko Automation Engine), but the system gives me tools to parse an xPath, and throw some JavaScript at it.
There are at least three reasons your XPath selects nothing:
DPM is not an immediate child of the root node
There is only one DPM, so DPM[2] won't select anything
There is no child of a DPM whose name is cip4:Part.
You also say in the narrative that there are three DPart's, which implies that DPart is not actually the outermost element as it appears to be in your sample. This makes it difficult to provide the correct XPath. However, you might be able to make a start with
(//DPM)[2]//*[name()='cip4:Part']

Can't select XML attributes with Oxygen XQuery implementation; Oxygen XPath emits result

I learned that every Xpath expression is also a valid Xquery expression. I'm using Oxygen 16.1 with this sample XML:
<actors>
<actor filmcount="4" sex="m" id="15">Anderson, Jeff</actor>
<actor filmcount="9" sex="m" id="38">Bishop, Kevin</actor>
</actors>
My expression is:
//actor/#id
When I evaluate this expression in Oxygen with Xpath 3.0, I get exactly what I expect:
15
38
However, when I evaluate this expression with Xquery 3.0 (also 1.0), I get the message: "Your query returned an empty sequence.
Can anyone provide any insight as to why this is, and how I can write the equivalent Xquery statement to get what the Xpath statement did above?
Other XQuery implementations do support this query
If you want to validate that your query (as corrected per discussion in comments) does in fact work with other XQuery implementations when entered exactly as given in the question, you can run it as follows (tested in BaseX):
declare context item := document { <actors>
<actor filmcount="4" sex="m" id="15">Anderson, Jeff</actor>
<actor filmcount="9" sex="m" id="38">Bishop, Kevin</actor>
</actors> };
//actor/#id
Oxygen XQuery needs some extra help
Oxygen XML doesn't support serializing attributes, and consequently discards them from a result sequence when that sequence would otherwise be provided to the user.
Thus, you can work around this with a query such as the following:
//actor/#id/string(.)
data(//actor/#id)
Below applies to a historical version of the question.
Frankly, I would not expect //actors/#id to return anything against that data with any valid XPath or XQuery engine, ever.
The reason is that there's only one place you're recursing -- one // -- and that's looking for actors. The single / between the actors and the #id means that they need to be directly connected, but that's not the case in the data you give here -- there's an actor element between them.
Thus, you need to fix your query. There are numerous queries you could write that would find the data you wanted in this document -- knowing which one is appropriate would require more information than you've provided:
//actor/#id - Find actor elements anywhere, and take their id attribute values.
//actors/actor/#id - Find actors elements anywhere; look for actor elements directly under them, and take the id attribute of such actor elements.
//actors//#id - Find all id attributes in subtrees of actors elements.
//#id - Find id attributes anywhere in the document.
...etc.

Xpath Expression evaluation on attributes with any namespace prefix

Could you please help me on this xpath expression evaluation
I am working on fetching the proxy references. In the xml file the references will get stored as:
One way of XML file will have the reference as below:
con1:service ref="MyProject/ProxyServices/service1"
xsi:type="con2:PipelineRef" xmlns:ref="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/reference"/
here in the xml file the name spaces are:
xmlns:con1="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/stages/config"
xmlns:con2="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/pipeline/config"
Another way of XML will have the reference as below.
con1:service ref="MyProject/ProxyServices/service2"
xsi:type="ref:ProxyRef" xmlns:ref="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/reference"/
here in the xml file the name spaces are:
xmlns:con1="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/stages/config"
xmlns:ref="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/reference"
I have used this xpath expression, this is not fetching the reference service values, could you please help what is wrong in it.
"//service[#type= #*[local-name() ='ProxyRef' or #type=#*[local-name() ='PipelineRef']]/#ref"
when I used like this it is working but, name space prefix is keep on changes when there are multiple references in the xml file.
"//service[#type='ref:ProxyRef'or #type='con:PipelineRef' or #type='con1:PipelineRef' or #type='con2:PipelineRef' or #type='con3:PipelineRef' ...#type='con20:PipelineRef' ]/#ref";
Now here basically the type attribute PipelineRef is keep on changing the name space prefix from con to con(n). Now I am looking for something which supports some thing like #type='*:PipelineRef' or #type='con*:PipelineRef' or the best way to fetch the service element reference attribute value.
Thanks in advance.
Try using contains() like so :
//service[contains(#type,':ProxyRef') or contains(#type,':PipelineRef')]
Another alternative would be using ends-with() function which is more precise for this purpose compared to contains() function. However, ends-with() isn't available in xpath 1.0, so there is a chance that you need to implement it yourself (feasible, but the xpath result is less intuitive for me).

Select element with a changing Id string using XPath

I have a textarea control with an Id that goes something like this:
<textarea id="NewTextArea~~51887~~1" rows="2"/>
And the xpath that has worked before has been
//textarea[#id, "NewTextArea~~51887~~1"]
But now the '51887' portion of the id is become diverse (changing every time) so I need to select the NewtextArea~~*~~1 element without actually specifying the number. Is there a way I can wildcard part of the string so that it will match a particular pattern? I tried using starts-with and ends-with but couldn't get it to work:
//textarea[starts-with(#id, 'NewTextArea~~') and ends-with(#name, '~~1')]
Bare in mind there are other fields with the difference being the number on the end.
Any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated :)
I tried using starts-with and ends-with but couldn't get it to work:
//textarea[starts-with(#id, 'NewTextArea~~') and ends-with(#name, '~~1')]
ends-with() is available as a standard function only in XPath 2.0 and you seem to be using XPath 1.0.
Use:
//textarea
[starts-with(#id, 'NewTextArea~~')
and
substring(#id, string-length(#id) - 2) = '~~1'
]
Explanation:
See the answer to this question, for how to implement ends-with() in XPath 1.0:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/405507/36305

XPath concat multiple nodes

I'm not very familiar with xpath. But I was working with xpath expressions and setting them in a database. Actually it's just the BAM tool for biztalk.
Anyway, I have an xml which could look like:
<File>
<Element1>element1<Element1>
<Element2>element2<Element2>
<Element3>
<SubElement>sub1</SubElement>
<SubElement>sub2</SubElement>
<SubElement>sub3</SubElement>
<Element3>
</File>
I was wondering if there is a way to use an xpath expression of getting all the SubElements concatted? At the moment, I am using:
/*[local-name()='File']/*[local-name()='Element3']/*[local-name()='SubElement']
This works if it only has one index. But apparently my xml sometimes has more nodes, so it gives NULL. I could just use
/*[local-name()='File']/*[local-name()='Element3']/*[local-name()='SubElement'][0]
but I need all the nodes. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks a lot!
Edit: I changed the XML, I was wrong, it's different, it should look like this:
<item>
<element1>el1</element1>
<element2>el2</element2>
<element3>el3</element3>
<element4>
<subEl1>subel1a</subEl1>
<subEl2>subel2a</subEl2>
</element4>
<element4>
<subEl1>subel1b</subEl1>
<subEl2>subel2b</subEl2>
</element4>
</item>
And I need to have a one line code to get a result like: "subel2a subel2b";
I need the one line because I set this xpath expression as an xml attribute (not my choice, it's specified). I tried string-join but it's not really working.
string-join(/file/Element3/SubElement, ',')
/File/Element3/SubElement will match all of the SubElement elements in your sample XML. What are you using to evaluate it?
If your evaluation method is subject to the "first node rule", then it will only match the first one. If you are using a method that returns a nodeset, then it will return all of them.
You can get all SubElements by using:
//SubElement
But this won't keep them grouped together how you want. You will want to do a query for all elements that contain a SubElement (basically do a search for the parent of any SubElements).
//parent::SubElement
Once you have that, you could (depending on your programming language) loop through the parents and concatenate the SubElements.

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