XPath: Nodes that have a child node that have an attribute

Question

XML Fragment

    <component name='Stipulations'>
        <group name='NoStipulations' required='N'>
            <field name='StipulationType' required='N' />
            <field name='StipulationValue' required='N' />
        </group>
    </component>
    <component name='NestedParties3'>
        <group name='NoNested3PartyIDs' required='N'>
            <field name='Nested3PartyID' required='N' />
            <field name='Nested3PartyIDSource' required='N' />
            <field name='Nested3PartyRole' required='N' />
            <group name='NoNested3PartySubIDs' required='N'>
                <field name='Nested3PartySubID' required='N' />
                <field name='Nested3PartySubIDType' required='N' />
            </group>
        </group>
    </component>
    <component name='UnderlyingStipulations'>
        <group name='NoUnderlyingStips' required='N'>
            <field name='UnderlyingStipType' required='N' />
            <field name='UnderlyingStipValue' required='N' />
        </group>
    </component>

What I want is all "group" nodes which have a child node of type "field" and a name "StipulationType".

This is what I've tried so far:

dictionary.XPathSelectElements("group[field[@name='StipulationType']]")
dictionary.XPathSelectElements("group[./field[@name='StipulationType']]")

Answer 1

Looks good. You might need to get a little more specific with your XPath depending on the implementation:

//group[field[@name='StipulationType']]

or

/component/group[field[@name='StipulationType']]

should work

Answer 2

The problem:

dictionary.XPathSelectElements("group[field[@name='StipulationType']]")

This selects all the group elements satisfying the predicate, which are children of the current node.

However, you want all group elements (satisfying the predicate) -- from the XML fragment it is clearly seen that not all group elements have the same parent.

The solution:

Evaluate the XPath expression from the grand-grandparent (based on the provided fragment!):

One example would be:

component/group[field[@name='StipulationType']] 

Based on the structure of the complete document (not provided), more location steps might be necessary.

What to avoid:

Avoid the // abbreviation as it may cause (with not good optimizing XPath engines) an extensive traversal of the whole subtree (even document) that starts from the node against this is evaluated.