Re: XPath: how to select based on element type?

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv@dyomedea.com>]

Sankaranarayanan K V wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 10:33:26AM +0000, Matt Sergeant wrote:
> > On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Sankaranarayanan K V wrote:
> > > (1) Is there a way a in XPath to select nodes based on their element type?
> >
> > Element type is not a term I recognise. Perhaps you either mean node type
> > or element name. Either way:
> 
> By "element type," I meant the value of the 'type' attribute in the
> element declaration (in the schema) for the element. That type which is
> declared using the xsd:simpleType or xsd:complexType elements in the
> schema definition.

I think this is one of the challenges of new schema mechanisms which
will need to provide an easy and neutral way to the applications to
access the associated schema information when reading instance documents
and DOM Level 3 is tackling this issue.

However, it would be rather optimistic to expect that XPath, a
recommendation published 16 November 1999, could provide a way to
seamlessly work with W3C XML Schema which isn't yet a recommendation ;=)
...

A hack to workaround this could be to develop a SAX parser that you add
"xsi:type" attributes to all the elements to give their types. However,
it wouldn't work for attributes...

Eric

> I didn't mean the node type or element name.
> 
> To give an example:
> 
> I want to pick up all elements of type 'Address' from the following
> document:
> 
>   <Person>
>     <Name>...</Name>
>     <WorkAddress>...</WorkAddress>
>     <HomeAddress>...</HomeAddress>
>   </Person>
> 
> where WorkAddress and HomeAddress may be of type Address in the schema
> definition.
> 
> Regards
> Sankar
> 
> --
> Sankaranarayanan K. V.          | sankar@migv.mot.com
> Motorola India Electronics Ltd  | http://www.mot.com/miel

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