How to exclude the XML declaration from each row of the result set?

Question

Hi,
I have a table with an XMLTYPE column and would like to SELECT a set of rows. How can I exclude the XML declaration from each row in the result set? My query currently looks like this, I'm executing it through Spring JDBC:
SELECT XMLSerialize(CONTENT t1.xmltext) FROM myschema.event t1 WHERE XMLEXISTS('$e/Event' PASSING XMLTEXT AS "e") ORDER BY t1.time DESC
After selecting, in my application I convert each row into a String and concatenate all rows into one big string in order to parse it into a DOM model. I get a parser exception (org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed) because there are multiple XML declarations in my big string. Of course, I could manually check the String of each row whether it starts with the XML declaration, but it would be nicer if I could instruct the DB not to add it in the first place. Is there a way?
Thanks!
-- Daniela

Answer 1

Hi,
A couple of options I can think of :
SELECT XMLSerialize(CONTENT
XMLtransform(t1.xmltext,
  xmltype('<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes"/> 
<xsl:template match="/"><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>')
FROM myschema.event t1
WHERE XMLEXISTS('$e/Event' PASSING XMLTEXT AS "e")
ORDER BY t1.time DESC
;or simply,
SELECT XMLSerialize(CONTENT
  extract(t1.xmltext,'/')
FROM myschema.event t1
WHERE XMLEXISTS('$e/Event' PASSING XMLTEXT AS "e")
ORDER BY t1.time DESC
;