Question

This is a piece of my XML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<catalog>
<mfVictor>
 <decal>
    <company>Victor</company>
    <title>Wood Horn with Blue Background</title>
    <image>
      <url>victor01.jpg</url>
      <width>60</width>
      <height>60</height>
      <name>Wood Horn Blue Background</name>
      <link></link>
    </image>
    <price>$15.00</price>
    <instock>In Stock</instock>
    <notes>none</notes>
  </decal>
</mfVictor>
</catalog>

I have a function that generates a list of the text from each “title” element. So then, onmousedown of each list item I want to navigate to the “decal” and access all of its children. So far I have this:

//decal[contains(.,\'"+itemName+"\')]

where the itemName is this.innerHTML passed to the function. It looks like the decal is accessed because in the console.log I can see an XMLobject with a length of 1. But I can’t figure out how to access either the children of “decal” or the siblings of “title”.

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

If you need to select a decal based on his title I would prefer the following xpaths:

//decal/title[contains(.,\'"+itemName+"\')]/parent::node()
//decal/title[contains(.,\'"+itemName+"\')]/..
//decal[title[contains(.,\'"+itemName+"\')]]

to select a sibling of the title of the decal you selected you can use

//decal/title[contains(.,\'"+itemName+"\')]/following-sibling::*

If you want all the children of the decal you select you can use (maybe you need this)

//decal[title[contains(.,\'"+itemName+"\')]]/child::*

or better, if you have the complete title

//decal[title[text()=\'"+itemName+"\']]/child::*

With the square bracket you instruct the parser to walk the xml tree to make a selection based on the condition you specify but without changing the context node. Think to the square brackets as a rubber-band, once the test contained in it are satisfied the parser revert back to the starting node and evaluate the rest of the xpath expression. The first two examples are a tipical