XPath expressions

HCL Commerce uses HCL Commerce extended XPath notation as the query language to identify the parts of the logical model you want to query. XPath is an industry standard language for addressing parts of an XML document, and the HCL Commerce extended XPath notation has some extensions to this standard.

The XML documents being addressed by the extended XPath notation are Nouns, which are converted to a Java class called a Service Data Object (SDO). SDO properties can be represented as attributes (in simple case such as String) or as elements (when its properties reference another SDO object). Usually this XML document is governed by a XML schema which defines the allowable content and semantics. These SDO objects and XML schema form the HCL Commerce logical model.

When using XPath expressions to query an XML document, HCL Commerce does not use the Java XPath APIs. When you run a query with an XPath expression, HCL Commerce maps the XPath expression to an SQL template (query template file). HCL Commerce uses this SQL template to generate the SQL query that performs the actual database query.