xml-dev - Re: Generating XPath expressions

[Steve Ball <Steve.Ball@zveno.com>]

"Khattar, Sanjay" wrote:
> 
> Does anyone here know of a quick way to generate an XPath expression like
> 'elemA[elemB='cdata1']' from an xml node instance like
> <elemA>
>     <elemB>cdata1</elemB>
> </elemA>
> 
> Of course, the node instance could be of arbitrary complexity.

I can't imagine that a general-purpose library could guess
at the user's intention, as your example seems to indicate is
required.  In this example, what is the context, what is to be
selected and how much of the surrounding context is to be
considered?

Perhaps what you want is:

given a context (DOM) node and a target (DOM) node, construct an XPath 
which will select the target from the context.

My initial thought is that in general there are many solutions for
any given context and target nodes.  In fact, the solution set is
most likely unbounded.

However, it would be feasible to construct a minimal path, perhaps
using only the parent and child axes.

HTHs,
Steve Ball

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