Full paths and relative paths in path processing

The XML path can be either a full path or a relative path.

Full paths

Full paths begins with a slash (/). If you use the all_xmltags parameter with xmlpath_processing, all of the full paths are indexed. You can index specific full or relative paths when you use the xmltags parameter.

Given the XML fragment:

<text>
<book>
	<title>Graph Theory</title>
	<author>Stewart</author>
	<date>January 14, 2006</date>
</book>
<text>

The following full XML paths can be processed with the xmlpath_processing parameter:

/text/book/title
/text/book/author
/text/book/date

Tip: If you have indexed a full path, include the initial slash (/) in the search predicate. For example:

bts_contains("/text/book/author:stewart")

Relative paths

Relative paths begin with text. You can specify one or more relative or full paths with the xmltags parameter.

Based on the preceding XML fragment, each of the following relative XML paths can be processed with the xmlpath_processing parameter:

text/book/title
text/book/author
text/book/date
book/title
book/author
book/date
title
author
date

The field is created from the first matching path for the values specified with the xmltags parameter.

You can create an index for the book/title and the title fields:

CREATE INDEX books_bts ON books(xml_data bts_lvarchar_ops) 
using bts(xmltags="(book/title,title)",xmlpath_processing=”yes”)
IN bts_sbspace;

In that case, the index will contain only the first matching field, book/title. It will not contain a title field:

book/title:Graph Theory

To view the fields that you have indexed, use the bts_index_fields() function. See bts_index_fields() function.