[xquery-talk] XQuery Platform Support

[Michael Kay]

> I do not need to do any transformations.  I am only 
> interested in querying XML to determine if a condition(s) 
> exists. I've only done one project with XSLT and I did not 
> like the syntax.  With this project I am currently working on 
> I need the ability to generate XQuery expressions on the fly 
> from a relational database that I have designed.  The 
> database contains conditions entered by a business user. The 
> database is built on a hierarchy of rules, conditions and 
> expressions. A rule can contain multiple conditions, a 
> condition can contain multiple expressions.  From the 
> research I have done it seemed quite a bit simpler to generate XQuery.

That might be true for you, though there are plenty of people using XSLT
meta-stylesheets to generate XSLT, and it's often quoted as being one of
the (few?) advantages of the XML-based syntax of XSLT that it makes it
easy to generate a stylesheet as the output of a stylesheet. The fact
that XQuery isn't XML does make it quite tricky to generate an XQuery as
the output of another XQuery.

Michael Kay