[xquery-talk] Use of for in XQuery

[Jeni Tennison]

Hi Amitabh,

> As u would have guessed, I wish to summate the length*breadth for
> all boxes.

The sum() function takes a sequence and sums the items in that
sequence. So if you want to sum the length*breadth of the boxes, you
need to create a sequence that contains the length*breadth of each
box, and then use the sum() function on that sequence. For example:

  sum( for    $box in (doc("boxes.xml")/boxes/box)
       return ($box/length * $box/breadth) )

Note that it's a lot easier to iterate over the <box> elements
themselves rather than iterating over a sequence of integers whose
length is the same as the number of <box> elements.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/