JSTL XPATH question

Question

I am using the XML taglib from JSTL 1.1 (SDK 1.5.0_03, Tomcat 5.5.9) in a JSP page. I am unable to get a node-set count; it always returns 0. I can loop through the docment and retrieve values, but no node functions (count( ), position( ), etc.).
Example:
<x:out select="count($doc/INVOICE_SETUPS/INVOICE_SETUP)" />
Does anyone have an idea as to what this could be? Any information would be greatly appreciated.
William

Answer 1

William,
I have had the same problem and it is indeed painful. Try this as a start:
     <x:out select="name($doc)" />      If you have the same problem I've had then the name of this node list will not be what you expected.
I think I have finally found the solution, as follows. The confusion I had was over the contents of the rowset resulting from use of x:parse. Firstly, these are my taglib prefixes:
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="/jstl/core" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="x" uri="/jstl/xml" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="sql" uri="/oracle/sql" %>      I then have the result of an Oracle query in XML form assigned to a variable using c:set:
<c:set var="resultslist">
     <sql:dbQuery output="XML" bindParams="search">
            SELECT LISTID, ...
            FROM ...
            WHERE ...
            ORDER BY ...
     </sql:dbQuery>
</c:set>      Now I can loop over the result using the following
          <x:parse xml="${resultslist}" var="listentry"/>
          <x:forEach select="$listentry/ROWSET/ROW" var="rowxml">
               <x:out select="$rowxml/LISTID"/>
          </x:forEach>      So it appeared to me that the listentry variable resulting from x:parse xml="${resultslist}" was a node-set of parents of ROWSET. Then I tried:
          <x:parse xml="${resultslist}" var="listentry"/>
          <x:out select="name($listentry)"/>
          <x:out select="count($listentry)"/>
          <x:out select="count($listentry/ROWSET)"/>
          <x:out select="count($listentry/ROW)"/>      And the results were:
     ROWSET
     1
     0
     4           Four was the result I was looking for! So the solution was that the resultslist node-set was the ROWSET object in the <x:forEach> rather than its parent.
Hope this helps someone.
Andy Newton