Question

I have an XML column that looks something like the following;

DECLARE @str AS VARCHAR(8000)

SET @str = '<Root xmlns="http://myurl.com/services/" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
           <Notifications>
               <Notification>
                  <NotificationDate>2012-08-16</NotificationDate>
                  <Scopes>
                    <NotificationScope>
                        <Code>a</Code>
                    </NotificationScope>  
                    <NotificationScope>
                        <Code>b</Code> 
                    </NotificationScope>
                  </Scopes>
                </Notification>
                <Notification>
                  <NotificationDate>2012-08-20</NotificationDate>
                  <Scopes>
                    <NotificationScope>
                        <Code>a</Code>
                    </NotificationScope>
                  </Scopes>
                </Notification>
            </Notifications></Root>'

I want to be able to get a count of the number of NotificationScope Elements per notification. So for example, I am looking for something like;

Notification Date                   Count
 2012-08-16                          2
 2012-08-20                          1

In fact, as in reality as this data is obtained from a database column, I am really only interested in returning those records that have ANY Notification Date with a Count that is greater than 1.

So far, all I’ve managed to come up with is the following, but that just gives me a count of ;

declare @xmlvar XML;
set @xmlvar = (SELECT cast(@str AS XML))
;WITH XMLNAMESPACES('http://myurl.com/services/' AS p)
SELECT * FROM (
select @xmlvar.value('count(/p:Root/p:Notifications/p:Notification/p:Scopes/p:NotificationScope)', 'INT') AS 'NotificationScopeCount',
       @xmlvar.value('count(/p:Root/p:Notifications/p:Notification/p:NotificationDate)', 'INT') AS 'NotificationDateCount'
 ) a WHERE NotificationScopeCount > NotificationDateCount

but ideally, I’d like to be able to get the associated date also. Please forgive me if this is a horrible way of going about this, I haven’t used XML datatypes much before in SQL.

Answer 1

You can try to use something like this:

;WITH XMLNAMESPACES('http://myurl.com/services/' AS p)
SELECT
    NotificationDate = Notif.value('(p:NotificationDate)[1]', 'DATE'),
    CodeCount = Notif.value('count(p:Scopes/p:NotificationScope/p:Code)', 'int')
FROM
    @xmlvar.nodes('/p:Root/p:Notifications/p:Notification') AS Tbl(Notif)

Gives me an output of: