XPath query

20 January 2004
Woke up this morning wondering about a utility to index a collection such as one might have in a folder or a collection of folders. Say I'm at the point in a project where I want to make some order out of what I've gathered up, and/or I want to improve access to my holdings in an area for another user... what can I do? Jon Udell's posting yesterday of XPath query tips is probably what put this into my mind, but I don't quite get it, or rather don't know what I need to do next to play further with the idea. Perhaps some of these will help:
XPath is basically a fairly sophisticated query language for data organised in a tree.
The language allows clients to search for specific named tags
- or tags that have specific named attributes
- or attributes with specific values.
(http://www.whitebeam.org/overview/xpathoverview.rhtm)

XML / XPath Query Examples By Robbe D. Morris

XPath tutorial

examples from MSDN

Performing an XPath Query on a DataSet (.NET Framework Developer's Guide)

HOWTO: Retrieve XML Data with an XPath Query in an ASP Client

This article demonstrates how to retrieve an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data stream from a SQL Server 2000 mapping schema by using an XPath query for an Active Server Pages (ASP) client. The sample also allows you to test XPath queries against the mapping schema. Two methods are used to show the results of the ASP XPath query.

...so once again I'm pointed in the direction of XML, SQLServer, ASP...