ORA-31185 DOM NODES DO NOT BELONG TO THE SAME DOCUMENT

Question

Hi all,
I developed an Oracle function that returns a XMLTYPE. In this function, I first created a node <ROOT> and I would like to append children nodes to this root node.
To create children nodes I loop on a cursor and each iteration of this loop "build" a XMLTYPE node. I would like append this XMLTYPE node to the root node but for now I get the ORA-31185 error !
Here is the code of my function (simplified version (without use of cursor)):
CREATE OR REPLACE
FUNCTION GET_MEDOC2 RETURN XMLTYPE IS
      parent_document DBMS_XMLDOM.DOMDOCUMENT;
   parent_rootnode DBMS_XMLDOM.DOMNODE;
   child_document  DBMS_XMLDOM.DOMDOCUMENT;
   child_rootnode  DBMS_XMLDOM.DOMNODE;
   rootXML XMLTYPE;
   subXML XMLTYPE;
   countLOOP NUMBER;
BEGIN
    SELECT XMLELEMENT("ROOT") INTO rootXML FROM DUAL;
    parent_document := DBMS_XMLDOM.newDOMDocument(rootXML);
    parent_rootnode := DBMS_XMLDOM.makeNode(DBMS_XMLDOM.getDocumentElement(parent_document));
     FOR countLOOP IN 1..10 LOOP
        SELECT XMLELEMENT("CHILD", countLOOP) INTO subXML FROM DUAL;
        child_document  := DBMS_XMLDOM.newDOMDocument(subXML);
        child_rootnode  := DBMS_XMLDOM.makeNode(DBMS_XMLDOM.getDocumentElement(child_document));   
        child_rootnode := DBMS_XMLDOM.appendchild(parent_rootnode, child_rootnode);  
     END LOOP;
     RETURN rootXML;
END GET_MEDOC2;When I execute the following :
SELECT GET_MEDOC2() FROM DUAL;I get the beautiful ORA-31185 DOM NODES DO NOT BELONG TO THE SAME DOCUMENT
What I expect is an XML like this :
<ROOT>
    <CHILD>1</CHILD>
    <CHILD>2</CHILD>
    <CHILD>3</CHILD>
    <CHILD>4</CHILD>
    <CHILD>5</CHILD>
    <CHILD>6</CHILD>
    <CHILD>7</CHILD>
    <CHILD>8</CHILD>
    <CHILD>9</CHILD>
    <CHILD>10</CHILD>
</ROOT>Can someone help me please ? (I'm on Oracle 10.1.0.5.0)
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi,
I get the beautiful ORA-31185 DOM NODES DO NOT BELONG TO THE SAME DOCUMENTYou need function importNode (or adoptNode) to copy nodes across different documents.
But, do not use DOM manipulation in this case.
A single query using SQL/XML functions is certainly simpler and more performant :
SELECT XMLElement("ROOT",
         XMLAgg(
           XMLelement("CHILD",
             XMLForest(
               empno
             , ename
           ) order by empno
       ) as result
FROM (
  -- your query goes here, e.g. :
  SELECT empno, ename
  FROM scott.emp
<ROOT>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7369</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>SMITH</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7499</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>ALLEN</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7521</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>WARD</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7566</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>JONES</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7654</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>MARTIN</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7698</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>BLAKE</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7782</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>CLARK</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7839</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>KING</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7844</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>TURNER</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7900</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>JAMES</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7902</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>FORD</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
  <CHILD>
    <EMPNO>7934</EMPNO>
    <ENAME>MILLER</ENAME>
  </CHILD>
</ROOT>