Question

I’m trying to design an XML document structure for my application.

I want to store a list of holes like following

<Holes>  <Hole id='1' dia='0.1' depth='2'/>  <Hole id='2' dia='0.2' depth='1.67'/>  <Hole id='3' dia='0.3' depth='0.44'/> </Holes> 

In another part of my document I want to refer to a hole by its id. e.g.

<Drill useHoleWithId='1'/> 

When my code finds above <Drill> element I want it to retrieve the values of ‘dia’ and ‘depth’ attributes in the <Hole> element that has id=’1′.

Of course I can search for a <Hole> element with id equal to the value of ‘useHoleWithId’ and then get the values of the attributes, but I thought maybe there’s a better way to do this using some XML trick. Is there?

PS – Though I don’t have any idea about them, may be any of XPath, XLink, XQuery or XPointer could help.

Answer 1

XPath is certainly one way to do it. An Xpath query to find the hold with id 1 would be something like Holes/Hole[@id='1']