[xquery-talk] nested if, then, for statements

[Jeni Tennison]

Hi Cindy,

> I'm trying to do something like the statement below, but I'm getting
> errors. Do I have the syntax wrong, or do I need to go about it
> completely differently?

You have (quite a lot of) the syntax wrong. The syntax of if is:

  if (condition) then result1 else result2

The brackets around the condition are required. There will usually be
brackets around result1 and result2 as well.

The syntax of for is (basically):

  for $variable in sequence return result

There must not be anything but whitespace between the "for" and the
"$" of the variable definition. There will usually be brackets around
the result.

There's no such operator as "&=" in XQuery. I think you need the
contains() function instead, although you might want matches().

So I think your query should look like:

let $query :=
  if ($ttl != "") then (
    for $entries in collection($collctn)//TEI.2
                      [contains(., $kwds) and
                       descendant::head[contains(., $ttl)]
    return (
      if ($entries/@id = "ppp.00271") then (
        ...
      )
      else if ($entries/@id = "ppp.00237") then (
        ...
      )
      else if ($entries/@id = "ppp.00473") then (
        ...
      )
      else (
        ...
      )
  )
  else if (...) then (
    ...
  )
  else (
    ...
  )

Cheers,

Jeni

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