Re: [Exist-open] XQuery newbie question

[Hank R. <ha...@cr...>]

I think you are looking for the collection()
function.  It lets you query over all the documents
in a collection, including any sub-collections. There
is also an extension that does NOT include sub-collections.

The XPath will only make sense if the documents structured
the same (valid against the same schema, not that one is required).

http://exist-db.org/xquery.html#N10263

Regards,
Hank

On Jan 13, 2009, at 2:06 PM, Jabba Laci wrote:

>>> In an eXist collection I have a set of documents on which I'd  
>>> like to
>>> execute some SELECTs from a Java application.
>
> Thanks for the previous answer. One more question: in my collection I
> have different types of XML files, e.g. Person (person1.xml), Book
> (book1.xml), etc, where each file contains only one instance. So
> instead of using one document for all the books, I have lots of
> separated files. A typical question: "Give me the books that were
> printed in 1990". As a result, I need the the name of the documents
> (book3.xml for instance). So first identify books in the collection,
> then perform a select on this narrowed set.
>
> Most of the examples that I saw work on a well-known document (for $p
> in doc("catalog.xml")...), but I don't know how to combine it with a
> search over the collection first. In my case, the document names
> reflect their contents, so for instance a Book is always in a
> book*.xml. It could be used in a wildcard expression.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Laszlo
>
>

Hank Ratzesberger
NEES@UCSB
Institute for Crustal Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara
805-893-8042