Help:COAP-3180/hw4

Homework 4 - COAP 3180 Fall 2 2007

COAP 3180 Course Page

Summary

• Write some Xquery code to retrieve data from an XML collection

Part 1

• Find somewhere or create a file with some XML data (at least 1 page long)
• Write at least two different XQuery expressions to retrieve data from this file

Due: Monday Week 6

Note: Programmers who wish to play with their own XML database can download eXist from source forge. Get the latest 1.1.x-newcore version, e.g. eXist-1.1.1-newcore-build4311.jar.

To install it, type in a command window: java -jar eXist-1.1.1-newcore-build4311.jar

Part 2

• [1] (The teacher's eXist server)

To be announced...

Classroom activities

Open an XML file in an XML editor

Learning how to use the XML Exchanger editor

• Launch XML Exchanger lite.
  • In the left panel open all the files under xquery
  • Click on the bottom tab with the books.xml file
  • In the menubar select Transform->XQuery
  • Note: You can find the xq file somewhere near the same place
• Repair the result file. There are some useless tags.

Other XML examples

• Other examples files can be found on the N drive

Files from Essential XQuery - The XML Query Language

• http://www.yukonxml.com/articles/xquery/emp.xml
• http://www.yukonxml.com/articles/xquery/timeoff.xml

Also some more ambitious

• http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/xml/examples/shakespeare.1.10.xml/ (various Shakespeare texts)
• http://tecfa.unige.ch/proj/seed/catalog/net/xml/catalog-eng.xml (700k DITA document)

Reading and links

Reading

Reading

• Ronald Bourret (2005). XML and Databases, http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/XMLAndDatabases.htm
• Darshan Singh, Essential XQuery - The XML Query Language, http://www.yukonxml.com/articles/xquery/ (skip the part about functions)
• XQuery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuery (Wikipedia)

Reference

You can find additional links and more tutorials here:

• XQuery
• XQuery_tutorial - basics (no tutorial so far, just links)
• XML database

Slides

• http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/files/xml-databases.pdf

Prerequisites and catchup (if needed)

• http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/files/xml-intro-edit.pdf (XML Intro)
  • or http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/files/xml-edit.pdf
• http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/files/xslt-basics.pdf (XSLT basics)
  • or http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/files/xml-xslt.pdf (XSLT intro)
• http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/files/xml-xpath.pdf (XPath and more XSLT)
• http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/files/xml-dtd.pdf (Creating DTDs)
• http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/files/xml-schema.pdf (Creating XML Schemas)
• http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/files/xml-ns.pdf (XML Namespaces)