Strange behaviour using XPath functions

Question

Hi guis,
I have next simple code:
DECLARE
v_xmltype XMLTYPE;
l_xml LONG := '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<document xmlns="http://www.sepbulgaria.com/services/"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sepbulgaria.com/services/ myschema.xsd ">
<person>
<name>Joe</name>
</person>
<person>
<name>Smith</name>
</person>
<person>
<name>Peter</name>
</person>
</document>';
BEGIN
v_xmltype := xmltype(l_xml);
FOR rec IN (SELECT t.COLUMN_VALUE.extract('/person/name/text()').getStringVal() name
FROM TABLE(xmlsequence(v_xmltype.extract('document/person'))) t) LOOP
dbms_output.put_line('name = ' || rec.name);
END LOOP;
END;
The purpose is to iterate over person elements and to read the value of name element for each. But this does not iterate in this variant. When I remove the attribute xmlns="http://www.sepbulgaria.com/services/" from the document element, it works.
I wonder what I'm doing wrong!
Thank you in advance!
G.Cholakov

Answer 1

Don't forget namespaces.
SQL> DECLARE
  2  v_xmltype XMLTYPE;
  3  l_xml LONG := '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  4  <document xmlns="http://www.sepbulgaria.com/services/"
  5  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  6  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sepbulgaria.com/services/ myschema.xsd ">
  7  <person>
  8  <name>Joe</name>
  9  </person>
10  <person>
11  <name>Smith</name>
12  </person>
13  <person>
14  <name>Peter</name>
15  </person>
16  </document>';
17  BEGIN
18  v_xmltype := xmltype(l_xml);
19
20  FOR rec IN (SELECT t.COLUMN_VALUE.extract('/person/name/text()','xmlns="http://www.sepbulgaria.com/services/"').getStringVal() name
21  FROM TABLE(xmlsequence(v_xmltype.extract('document/person','xmlns="http://www.sepbulgaria.com/services/"'))) t) LOOP
22  dbms_output.put_line('name = ' || rec.name);
23  END LOOP;
24
25  END;
26  /
name = Joe
name = Smith
name = PeterBTW, why are you doing in plsql what can easily be accomplished in sql?
Best regards
Maxim