Hi Johanna,

it looks as if your quoted example from the »XQuery Kick Start« books is XQuery-only, ignoring other languages such as PHP, so (I guess?) it's quite comparable to the example I proposed below.

The only difference is the XQuery syntax, which has changed in the final W3 Recommendation:

Old: define function func() { ... }; Final: declare function local:func() { ... };

Regarding the mix of PHP and XQuery, unfortunately, you won't be able to "import" any XQuery functions. Instead, you'll have to decide which world world you prefer – currently, they are just too different to go hand in hand.

Does this come closer to your initial question? Christian

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Johanna Vompras johanna.vompras@uni-bielefeld.de wrote:

Hi Christian,

thanks for the quick answer and the example! Yes, Xquery seems to have many advantages. Although this example do not 100% match what i have in mind. My intention is first to query the XML Database and transfer the results to a function (in the above example FUNCTION) This function should then dynamically be invoked on the results.

$cmd = 'for $node in doc("factbook")//country return FUNCTION($node)';

But where can I define this function withhin my .php file ... Is there a possibility to say "import FUNCTIONSFILE.xquery" ???? Maybe I understand something wrong ...

I have also found this example, it is nearly that what I have in mind (but I didn't get it to run!)

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=101764&seqNum=11

In principle, I want to apply external functions on my xquery results.

Hope it does not sount very confusing ...

Thanks for helping

Johanna.

Am 13.07.2010 16:59, schrieb Christian Grün:

...

Hi Johanna,

your questions are welcome – I'm just forwarding them back to the mailing-list, as they might be interesting for others as well.

The most elegant way to use XML is actually to build the larger snippets in XQuery (although our php table example points to another direction…). In the beginning, this might sound tedious, but it's worth the time; XQuery is pretty simple, compared to e.g. XSLT, and, yet, very manifold and powerful enough to construct very complex XML/HTML snippets. The BaseX GUI Editor might help you to get to know the language (you'll immediately see the query results after each key click if you choose "Options->Realtime Execution").

XQuery is often called an »Information Processing Language«, which means that it allows much more than other query languages, such as SQL.

The following snippet shows you how to construct an HTML table via XQuery:

(: Beginning of Query :)

<table border='0'> <tr>   <th>Name</th>   <th>Population</th> </tr> {   for $country at $p in //country   let $color := if($p mod 2) then '#eeeeee' else '#ffffff'   return     <tr style="background-color:{ $color };">       <td>{ data($country/name) }</td>       <td>{ data($country/@population) }</td>     </tr> } </table> (: End of Query :)

Note that your XQuery results will always be well-formed, which isn't the case for PHP. Said this, it is even more elegant to construct complete HTML documents in XQuery – but this will surely render the source files more unreadable for non-XQuery-folks.

Feel free to ask for more, Christian

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On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Johanna Vompras johanna.vompras@uni-bielefeld.de wrote:

...

Hi Christian,

Thank you! I have just tried it out (throught the BaseX-Api) and it works. My Question now is, how to link this a functionality into a .php file, e.g. the TableExample.php which can be downloaded from https://svn.uni-konstanz.de/dbis/basex/trunk/api/etc/php/ . It looks like:

include("BaseXClient.php");

// commands to be performed $cmd = 'for $node in doc("factbook")//country order by xs:int($node/@population) return data($node/@name)'; $cmd2 = 'for $node in doc("factbook")//country order by xs:int($node/@population) return data($node/@population)';

try {  // create session  $session = new Session("localhost", 1984, "admin", "admin");

echo "<table border='0' cellspacing='2' cellpadding='4' width='20%'>

<tbody><tr style='text-align:center;'><tbody><tr style='text-align:center;'>";  echo "<td style='text-align:center;background-color:#D7D7D7;border:#ffffff 1px solid;font-size:12pt;'></td>";  echo "<td style='text-align:center;background-color:#D7D7D7;border:#ffffff 1px solid;font-size:12pt;'>Country</td>";  echo "<td style='text-align:center;background-color:#D7D7D7;border:#ffffff 1px solid;font-size:12pt;'>Population</td>";  try {    $query = $session->query($cmd);    $query2 = $session->query($cmd2);    $count = 0;    while($query->more()) {

............ etc ...

Where schould I define a such user-defined function, so I can allready use it in the xquery statement? In the $cmd variable before the xquery expression? It is not an elegant way .... Is there a possibility to include some XQuery functions from en external file, by saying: "include ...." ???

Sorry for so much questions!!

Thanks!

Johanna.

Am 13.07.2010 16:24, schrieb Christian Grün:

...

Johanna,

specifying nodes as arguments is straight-forward in XQuery; this expression might do what you want:

declare function local:createTable($n as node()) as node()* {   for $c in $n/*   return<result/> }; for $node in doc("database")//node return local:createTable($node)

Hope this helps, Christian

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 3:02 PM,johanna.vompras@uni-bielefeld.de  wrote:

...

Hi, I am relatively new to baseX and XQuery and just trying the funcionalities of BaseX. I have got some questions on the possibility of defining user-defined functions, which take a node (or a node set) as parameters and process them subsequently (e.g. format the results as an html table, or another numerical computations etc.).

This might look like this:

define function createTable($n as node) {  for $c in $n/* return<some html-output>; }

and I would like to use the defined function "createTable" in a xquery expression. For example :

for $questionscheme in doc("database")//d:QuestionScheme return createTable($questionscheme/node())

That means I need to pass a whole node (not the query results as string), in order to process the node with further xquery expressions. Is this compatible with BaseX? And where should I define such functions? Defining a function through the XQuery-API does not work. The functions in class Query in the BaseXClient.php seem to only support a successive query processing (one result tuple after another). Or have I overseen something? If not, can this class be quickly modified to support this?

Many thanks for your help on this!

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