Getting the following sibling in an XPath when "following" axis is not supported.

Question

I am trying to get the text elements of a table that follows a paragraph that contains a specific text element using XQuery on MS SQL Server. The problem is whenever I use the axes "following", "following-sibling" or "previous-sibling", I get an error saying this is not supported in SQL Server (I'm using version 2008). So for instance, I can get the first paragraph node that contains a text node whose value is "blah":

//w:p[descendant::w:t = "blah"]

And I can get the text from a table element using:

//w:tbl//w:t/text()

I don't see any way I can force the query to only return the first table element that follows the previously captured paragraph node since:

//w:tbl[following:://w:p//w:t = "blah"]//w:t/text()

Gives the error: "XQuery [Specification.document.query()]: The XQuery syntax 'following' is not supported."

And the same for:

//w:tbl[following-sibling::w:p[descendant::w:t = "blah"]]//w:t/text()

Gives "XQuery [Specification.document.query()]: The XQuery syntax 'following-sibling' is not supported."

That ain't right, y'all know! XPath has supported following and following-sibling since 1.0 back in 1999 AFAICT so MS SQL Server seems to be severely deficient in terms of standard compliance but either way, does anyone see a way I can do this without those axes? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Document order of nodes in XQuery can also be evaluated by using node comparison operators.

Operator >> applies to two nodes and returns true if the left hand side node follows the right hand side node in document order. For solving your problem, you'd select the first such node.

In the following code, $blah and $text are the given expressions. The returned value is the first node in $text that follows the first node in $blah.

let $blah := //w:p[descendant::w:t = "blah"]
let $text := //w:tbl//w:t/text()
return $text[. >> $blah[1]][1]

Or, combined into a single expression,

(//w:tbl//w:t/text()[. >> (//w:p[descendant::w:t = "blah"])[1]])[1]