Question

Been a while since I used VB. I am having a problem running an XPATH query on some XML.

I have the following XML:

<configuration>
    <my.app.application>
        <dummydatasets>
            <dummydataset tag="\\server\XX_YY_ZZ" />
            <dummydataset tag="default" mode="random" />
        </dummydatasets>
    </my.app.application>
</configuration>

I am trying to find the dummy data set using XPATH. The XPATH to evaluate is:

//configuration/my.app.application/dummydatasets/dummydataset [@tag=”\\server\XX_YY_ZZ”]

So that is double backslash, “server”, slash, “XX_YY_ZZ”.

The VB6 code is as follows:

Dim xmlDoc As New DOMDocument
If xmlDoc.Load(path to xml) Then

    Dim theTag As String
    theTag = "\\server\XX_YY_ZZ"
    Dim xPathQuery As String
    xPathQuery = "//configuration/my.app.application/dummydatasets/dummydataset [@tag='" & theTag & "']"
    Set xmlNode = xmlDoc.selectSingleNode(xPathQuery)

End If

The tag cannot be found. xmlNode is set to Nothing. However using a utility such as XML Copy Editor, I can enter the XPATH and the node is found. However, if I select the default tag, the code works fine.

I didn’t think there would be a problem with the tag attribute’s text with the backslash and underscores. I am hopefully wrong.

Any thoughts,

Thanks

Andez

Answer 1

I tested this and the issue is with the backslashes. Underscores were fine but the backslashes caused issues.

You need to specify the SelectionLanguage in DOMDocument after it is created:

xmlDoc.setProperty "SelectionLanguage", "XPath"

Here is the source page.