XPath Select: Relative Path not working with Following-Sibling

Question

I've seen this question asked many times but in slightly different ways. Looking at similar examples, there's something I'm still missing.

With the information below, I'm trying to do a XPath 1.0 select to get a set of unique customer account values from a XML with accounts. Executing a XSLT with templates, for-each's, and using Muenchian Grouping is not possible.

I have this XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Envelope xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/dynamics/2008/01/documents/Message">
    <Body xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/dynamics/2008/01/documents/Message">
        <MessageParts xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/dynamics/2008/01/documents/Message">
            <ReportArchive xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/dynamics/2008/01/documents/ReportArchive">
                <Report class="entity">
                    <_DocumentHash>d1fd3992e1d6cde8fd06512cea125792</_DocumentHash>
                    <ReportSection class="entity">
                        <Name>AddressBody</Name>
                        <Type>Body</Type>
                        <ReportSectionField class="entity">
                            <Name>CustTable_AccountNum</Name>
                            <Value>0000000001</Value>
                        </ReportSectionField>
                    </ReportSection>
                    <ReportSection class="entity">
                        <Name>AddressBody</Name>
                        <Type>Body</Type>
                        <ReportSectionField class="entity">
                            <Name>CustTable_AccountNum</Name>
                            <Value>0000000001</Value>
                        </ReportSectionField>
                    </ReportSection>
                    <ReportSection class="entity">
                        <Name>AddressBody</Name>
                        <Type>Body</Type>
                        <ReportSectionField class="entity">
                            <Name>CustTable_AccountNum</Name>
                            <Value>0000000002</Value>
                        </ReportSectionField>
                    </ReportSection>
                    <ReportSection class="entity">
                        <Name>AddressBody</Name>
                        <Type>Body</Type>
                        <ReportSectionField class="entity">
                            <Name>CustTable_AccountNum</Name>
                            <Value>0000000003</Value>
                        </ReportSectionField>
                    </ReportSection>
                    <ReportSection class="entity">
                        <Name>AddressBody</Name>
                        <Type>Body</Type>
                        <ReportSectionField class="entity">
                            <Name>CustTable_AccountNum</Name>
                            <Value>0000000004</Value>
                        </ReportSectionField>
                    </ReportSection>
                    <ReportSection class="entity">
                        <Name>AddressBody</Name>
                        <Type>Body</Type>
                        <ReportSectionField class="entity">
                            <Name>CustTable_AccountNum</Name>
                            <Value>0000000005</Value>
                        </ReportSectionField>
                    </ReportSection>
                </Report>
            </ReportArchive>
        </MessageParts>
    </Body>
</Envelope>

With this XPath:(//*[local-name()='ReportSectionField'][./*[local-name()='Name'] = 'CustTable_AccountNum']/*[local-name()='Value'])[not(. = following-sibling::*)]/text()

Using "()", my assumption was that the relative path select would create a node-set, and then the "not()" filter part would parse each sibling in the result set and return the unique values. When I use the "following-sibling" axis this fails, but the "following" axis works. I don't want to traverse the descendants, so "following" is not the axis I want to use. What am I missing and can someone help me visualize what's going on?

Some other things to note: - The XPath Compiler is .Net based (1.0) utilized by BizTalk (See this article for the reasons why: XPath and XSLT 2.0 for .NET?)

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 15 '18 at 01:38

XPath addresses the nodes in the source document. So, relative from the selected value element, you would still need to look at the following:: axis, since the other value elements are not siblings.

You could adjust the XPath to be a bit more specific when selecting the value elements to compare values against by "jumping up" to the ReportSection element, and then looking at the following-sibling::* that satisfy the same selection criteria to find value elements to compare and filter:

//*[local-name() = 'ReportSectionField' and 
      *[local-name() = 'Name' and . = 'CustTable_AccountNum']]/
    *[local-name() = 'Value' and 
      not(. = ../../following-sibling::*/
                *[local-name() = 'ReportSectionField' and  
                    *[local-name() = 'Name' and . = 'CustTable_AccountNum']]/
                  *[local-name() = 'Value']
       )
     ]/text()

This is great and makes perfect sense. I didn't realize that the axis was still looking at the source and not my sub-select. Thanks for the help! — Sean, Aug 15 '18 at 13:58

XPath Select: Relative Path not working with Following-Sibling

1 Answers1