Searching for multiple pieces of data in an XML file

[Navitas]

Hi,

I've done some work with XML and Xpaths before, but I'm currently stumped on the simplist way to achieve this goal!

I want to search an XML file for multiple pieces of data using the AND operator. EG.

<booking>
<customers>
<name>Fred</name>
<name>Barney</name>
<customers>
<location>
<city>London</air>
<city>France</air>
</location>
</booking>

I want to search the XML file and perform actions if the file contains the name Fred AND the city London.

Can I do this with a single xpath query that will return either a boolean value or an object containing the elements?
Thanks in advance for any help!

Darren

 

[jaybytez]

First off, your XML is not well-formed. Here is a well-formed version:

<booking>
  <customers>
    <name>Fred</name>
    <name>Barney</name>
  </customers>
  <location>
    <city>London</city>
    <city>France</city>
  </location>
</booking>

I created an little xslt that just does a simple test:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">[/URL]
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" omit-xml-declaration="no" encoding="UTF-16" indent="yes" media-type="text/xml"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:if test="booking/customers[name='Fred'] and booking/location[city='London']">Straight Path</xsl:if>
    <br/>
    <xsl:if test="//customers[name='Fred'] and //location[city='London']">Slower Path</xsl:if>    
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

-jay

 

[Navitas]

Thanks Jay

Sorry about the XML - I'd been swapping things around - and it looks like I completely buggered it up!!

Anyway thanks for your help - but I was trying to perform the match programmatically rather than through an xslt.

more like :

if (xmlDoc.selectSingleNode(///customers[name='Fred'] and //location[city='London'])
{
Some actions
}

Is that possible?

Cheers
Darren

 

[jaybytez]

Yes, I used DOM4J when programming through Java. DOM4J utilizes Jaxen for XPath, and I always fetched nodes utilizing XPath.

One thing you may need to think about though. If you are using a selectSingleNode, you probably want to make sure that your XPath is doing the same thing. The XPath I give you tests to see if that pattern exists. But if you using it to pull back a single node, I am not sure if it would like that XPath structure...because it is really asking for a customer node and a location node. It maybe smarter to design the XPath to resolve to one node like:

"//booking[*/name='Fred' and */city='London']"

This will say that search for any booking elements that contain name='Fred' and city='London' as grandchildren...more or less.

-jay