ORA-19279: XPTY0004 - XQuery dynamic type mismatch: expected singleton sequ

Question

I have been working with XML files containing only one record. I downloaded instructions to create/insert/select and the statements below work fine for the XML files with one record. Now I have XML files with multiple records/sections, but the select statement returns ORA-19279. How would I change the create/insert/select statements to handle XML files with more than one record? There is still only one vendata section, but there are multiple VendorData sections.
Thanks.
1.     Create a table with an XML column:
create table vendxml_col (
vend_id number primary key,
vend_doc XMLType);
2.     Insert xml document:
insert into vendxml_col values (1,
XMLType(bfilename('ING_FEED', 'VenData.xml'),
nls_charset_id('AL32UTF8')));
3.     Query the xml columns in vendxml_col:
select vend_id,
a.cage, a.repl_cage, a.status, a.company1, a.company2, a.address1, a.address2,
a.pobox, a.city, a.state, a.zip, a.country, a.phone, a.fax, a.cao, a.adpp,
a.assoc, a.type, a.affil, a.sizex, a.pri_bus, a.type_bus, a.woman, a.sic,
a.formerly, a.formerly2, a.comp1key, a.comp2key, a.Revseq, a.Source,
a.RequestID
FROM vendxml_col,
XMLTABLE('/vendata'
PASSING vendxml_col.vend_doc
COLUMNS
     cage varchar2(5) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/cage',
     repl_cage varchar2(5) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/repl_cage',
     status varchar2(1) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/status',
     company1 varchar2(30) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/company1',
     company2 varchar2(30) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/company2',
     address1 varchar2(40) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/address1',
     address2 varchar2(40) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/address2',
     pobox varchar2(10) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/pobox',
     city varchar2(30) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/city',
     state varchar2(2) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/state',
     zip varchar2(20) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/zip',
     country varchar2(20) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/country',
     phone varchar2(20) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/phone',
     fax varchar2(20) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/fax',
     cao varchar2(20) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/cao',
     adpp varchar2(20) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/adpp',
     assoc varchar2(20) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/assoc',
     type varchar2(1) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/type',
     affil varchar2(1) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/affil',
     sizex varchar2(1) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/sizex',
     pri_bus varchar2(1) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/pri_bus',
     type_bus varchar2(1) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/type_bus',
     woman varchar2(1) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/woman',
     sic varchar2(4) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/sic',
     formerly varchar2(5) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/formerly',
     formerly2 varchar2(5) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/formerly2',
     comp1key varchar2(30) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/comp1key',
     comp2key varchar2(30) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/comp2key',
     Revseq varchar2(1) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/Revseq',
     Source varchar2(3) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/Source',
     RequestID varchar2(3) PATH '/vendata/VendorData/RequestID'
) a
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Edited by: user8058903 on Jun 9, 2011 11:28 AM

Answer 1

Welcome to the XML DB forums.
As everything in your sample XML is coming from the VendorData node, you can just include that in the XQuery string parm such as shown below. As you didn't include any sample XML, I just built a really simple test case with two VendorData nodes. As the note says, I used WITH to simulate your table/data because I was too lazy to create and populate a table in my playground.
WITH vendxml_col AS
(SELECT 1 vend_id,
        XMLTYPE('<vendata><VendorData><cage>c1</cage></VendorData>
        <VendorData><cage>c2</cage></VendorData></vendata>') vend_doc
   FROM dual)
-- Above WITH used to simulate your table/data.  You only care about below
SELECT vend_id, a.cage
  FROM vendxml_col,
       XMLTABLE('/vendata/VendorData'
                PASSING vendxml_col.vend_doc
                COLUMNS
                cage    VARCHAR2(5) PATH 'cage') a;
   VEND_ID CAGE
         1 c1
         1 c2