[xquery-talk] suppressing emission of elements if no value

[Francis Upton]

I have an application where I am generating XQuery and have a requirement 
that if there is no value for an expression, it should not generate an element.

So I would like something like:

   element x { a/b }

to emit nothing, assuming a/b is empty.

This expression emits <x></x> when a/b is empty.

The only way I can think of to do this is to wrap a condition around it like:

   if (a/b) then element x { a/b } else ()

Is there any other way to approach this?  I don't like wrapping an if 
statement around it because the "a/b" can be quite complex and time 
consuming to compute and there could be quite a number of these in the 
types of documents I'm working with.  I realize this may be something that 
some XQuery engines might optimize; if that's the case it's probably fine.

Thanks for your help.

Francis


Francis Upton IV
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