C# What query language to specify in rule to pull out the two book nodes.

Question

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
  <bookstore>

      <book category="COOKING"> 
        <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>    
        <year>2005</year>
       <price>30.00</price>
      </book>

      <book category="CHILDREN">
       <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
       <author>J K. Rowling</author>
       <year>2005</year>
       <price>29.99</price>
      </book>

      <book category="WEB">
       <title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title>
       <author>James McGovern</author>
       <author>Per Bothner</author>
       <author>Kurt Cagle</author>
       <author>James Linn</author>
       <author>Vaidyanathan Nagarajan</author>
       <year>2003</year>
       <price>49.99</price>
      </book>

      <book category="WEB">
       <title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
       <author>Erik T. Ray</author>
       <year>2003</year>
       <price>39.95</price>
      </book>

    </bookstore>

Hi, Currently, I have a rules based system, where incoming xml messages are matched against a rule, and if the rule hits, the packet is processed. To get a match I use xpath to select individual values in the xml, and I specify these in the rule as combined xpath:regexp expressions, something like this.

/bookstore/book[1]/ title: (.+)

For example the above would match against the "Everyday Italian"

But I'm trying to find a query or perhaps a new query language expression which will allow me to select all the book nodes for the above classic msdn docs book.xml, such that if I specify the query expression in the rule, I can lift it using a parser, and use it directly against the xml file to pull out the books node.

I don't know if xpath can do it. I was looking at XQuery, but it seems wordy. XSLT could probably do it, but it's wordy. Any ideas.

Is their a simple way of specifying an expression such that it would lift all book nodes, or say 1 and 2, or 1st and 3rd.

Thanks. Bob.

Answer 1

The following questions, which of a different design, answered it indirectly.

XPath Node Select