Skip to main content

Extracting XML comments with XQuery

I've just discovered that it's possible to process comment nodes using XQuery. Ideally it should not be the case if you take part in designing your data formats, then you should simply store valuable data in plain xml. But I have to deal with OntoML data source that uses a bit peculiar format while export to XML, i.e. some data fields are stored inside XML comments. So here is an example how to solve this problem.

XML example
This is an example stub of one real xml with irrelevant data omitted. There are several thousands of xmls like this stored in Sedna XML DB collection. Finally, I need to extract the list of pairs for the complete collection: identifier (i.e. SOT1209) and saved timestamp (i.e. 2012-12-12 23:58:13.118 GMT).
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>

<!--EXPORT_PROGRAM:=eptos-iso29002-10-Export-V10-->

<!--File saved on: 2012-12-12 23:58:13.118 GMT-->

<!--XML Schema used: V099-->
<cat:catalogue xmlns:cat="urn:iso:std:iso:ts:29002:-10:ed-1:tech:xml-schema:catalogue" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:id="urn:iso:std:iso:ts:29002:-5:ed-1:tech:xml-schema:identifier" xmlns:val="urn:iso:std:iso:ts:29002:-10:ed-1:tech:xml-schema:value" xmlns:bas="urn:iso:std:iso:ts:29002:-4:ed-1:tech:xml-schema:basic" xsi:type="cat:catalogue_Type" xsi:schemaLocation="urn:iso:std:iso:ts:29002:-10:ed-1:tech:xml-schema:catalogue http://www.paradine.net/schema/dictionary/1.0/ontoML/ISO29002/catalogue.xsd">
<!--SOT1209-->
...
</cat:catalogue>
XQuery
First, I have to use a namespace declaration because of the cat namespace used in xml. Second, the task becomes trivial if you know comment() XPath expression that matches XML comment nodes.
declare namespace cat = "urn:iso:std:iso:ts:29002:-10:ed-1:tech:xml-schema:catalogue";

for $file in collection("ontoML/packages")
return concat($file/cat:catalogue/comment(), ',',
              $file/comment()[2]/substring-after(., ': '))
Results
This is the CSV-output of the given XQuery:
SOT1209,2012-12-12 23:58:13.118 GMT
SOT120A,2012-12-12 23:58:18.665 GMT
SOT1210,2012-12-12 23:58:22.517 GMT
...
P.S. If you're dealing with an opposite task of creating XML comments from XQuery, there is an XML comment constructor.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connection to Amazon Neptune endpoint from EKS during development

This small article will describe how to connect to Amazon Neptune database endpoint from your PC during development. Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service from Amazon. Due to security reasons direct connections to Neptune are not allowed, so it's impossible to attach a public IP address or load balancer to that service. Instead access is restricted to the same VPC where Neptune is set up, so applications should be deployed in the same VPC to be able to access the database. That's a great idea for Production however it makes it very difficult to develop, debug and test applications locally. The instructions below will help you to create a tunnel towards Neptune endpoint considering you use Amazon EKS - a managed Kubernetes service from Amazon. As a side note, if you don't use EKS, the same idea of creating a tunnel can be implemented using a Bastion server . In Kubernetes we'll create a dedicated proxying pod. Prerequisites. Setting up a tunnel. ...

Notes on upgrade to JSF 2.1, Servlet 3.0, Spring 4.0, RichFaces 4.3

This article is devoted to an upgrade of a common JSF Spring application. Time flies and there is already Java EE 7 platform out and widely used. It's sometimes said that Spring framework has become legacy with appearance of Java EE 6. But it's out of scope of this post. Here I'm going to provide notes about the minimal changes that I found required for the upgrade of the application from JSF 1.2 to 2.1, from JSTL 1.1.2 to 1.2, from Servlet 2.4 to 3.0, from Spring 3.1.3 to 4.0.5, from RichFaces 3.3.3 to 4.3.7. It must be mentioned that the latest final RichFaces release 4.3.7 depends on JSF 2.1, JSTL 1.2 and Servlet 3.0.1 that dictated those versions. This post should not be considered as comprehensive but rather showing how I did the upgrade. See the links for more details. Jetty & Tomcat. JSTL. JSF & Facelets. Servlet. Spring framework. RichFaces. Jetty & Tomcat First, I upgraded the application to run with the latest servlet container versio...

DynamicReports and Spring MVC integration

This is a tutorial on how to exploit DynamicReports reporting library in an existing  Spring MVC based web application. It's a continuation to the previous post where DynamicReports has been chosen as the most appropriate solution to implement an export feature in a web application (for my specific use case). The complete code won't be provided here but only the essential code snippets together with usage remarks. Also I've widely used this tutorial that describes a similar problem for an alternative reporting library. So let's turn to the implementation description and start with a short plan of this how-to: Adding project dependencies. Implementing the Controller part of the MVC pattern. Modifying the View part of the MVC pattern. Modifying web.xml. Adding project dependencies I used to apply Maven Project Builder throughout my Java applications, thus the dependencies will be provided in the Maven format. Maven project pom.xml file: net.sourcefo...