XPATH help

Question

I'm trying to write a little game in Flash that uses XML for
persistent storage of questions and answers. Our e-learning
developers can then reuse the game in various e-learning courses
w/out having to do anything in Flash. I developed a "standard" XML
format for handling questions and answers (and some additional
stuff like hints and feedback), and used this XML format in a
JavaScript-based game w/out any trouble (using XPATH to get the
relevant data out of the XML file).
I'm having trouble getting the XPATH statements in
ActionScript to work however.
In JavaScript, I used statements like:
questionsArray[z]["theText"]=
questionNodes.item(z).selectSingleNode("theText").text;
questionsArray[z]["theHint"]=
questionNodes.item(z).selectSingleNode("hint").text;
, etc, where questionNodes is the XML containing all the
questions, to create an array of questions and answers.
When I try the same statements in ActionScript (using what I
think would be the correct ActionScript syntax), I always get null
results.
For example:
questionsArray[z]["theText"]=
XPathAPI.selectSingleNode(questionNodes.item[z], "theText");
questionsArray[z]["theHint"]=
XPathAPI.selectSingleNode(questionNodes.item[z], "hint");
For that matter, I can never get a trace to put out anything
when using item[ ] syntax. For example, the following is undefined:
trace (questionNodes.item[1]);
Basically what I'm trying to do is create an array from the
XML data, but I can't figure out how to "walk through" the XML data
as I can in JS.
Any ideas? I know the XML is loading properly because I have
some other XPATH statements that have worked..
Thanks for any advice! - Mike

Answer 1

You'll need to decide which node(s) you want to return as the result of whatever XPath expression you come up with. Then you'll need to write a suitable predicate which implements your requirements. Your rough example doesn't have enough information to produce an XPath expression.
XPath will return all nodes which satisfy that expression. And casting a nodeset to boolean results in true if the nodeset contains any nodes and false if it contains none.