XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Wolfgang Hoschek <whoschek AT lbl.gov>]

On Jan 24, 2005, at 1:16 PM, Fred Vos wrote:

> Dear Wolfgang,
>
> If you think I should ask this question on th XOM-list, please say so 
> in your
> reply and I will post it on that list!

Yes, please ask on the XOM-interest list, so others can also benefit 
from the exchange and comment.
I'm copying the list here.
More below...

> This weekend I started with using NUX. I'm working on an indexing tool 
> for
> lucene that can index XML-files using a config-file. The config-file 
> (XML)
> describes paths to records, for instance '/tracks/file'. Furthermore it
> describes paths to each field of the record, for instance 
> 'comments/artist' or
> 'comments/album'.
>
> With NUX's XQueryUtil it is easy to get all records from a document:
>
> Nodes nodes = XQueryUtil.xquery(dataDoc, dataSourceRecordPath);
> for (int j=0; j < nodes.size(); j++) {
>   // process each record
> }
>
> String variable 'dataSourceRecordPath' contains the path to each 
> record, like
> '/tracks/file' in the example above.
>
> But it is more difficult to get each field from the record, because 
> all I have
> is nodes, not elements. How can I get the value of the 
> 'comments/artist'
> element for a certain record node?
>
> I did find a stupid solution: I convert each node with the toXML() 
> method into
> a string and parse this string into a new document and then use 
> XQueryUtil
> again to fetch the field values.
>
> I cannot believe this is the best way to achieve the results I want. 
> Do you
> have a better suggestion?
>
> Thanks in advance for your answer and for your work on NUX.
>
> Fred

You could try another query on the results of the first query, 
something along the following lines:

Nodes nodes = XQueryUtil.xquery(dataDoc, dataSourceRecordPath);
for (int j=0; j < nodes.size(); j++) {
  // process each record
  Nodes subNodes = XQueryUtil.xquery(nodes.get(j), "comments/artist");
  for (int i=0; i < subNodes.size(); i++) {
     // process each subrecord
  }
}

Wolfgang.