[xquery-talk] Selecting Descendants

[Jason Hunter]

> I'm seeking a way to select only those descandants in a tree which fit a 
> criterion but not their descandants (even if those fit the critirion as 
> well).
> 
> I know, you can select with //node-name, but that will give back 
> children of node-name with name node-name as well and i don't want them 
> (got it?)

You *are* in fact only selecting the nodes with those names.  Think of 
nodes as pointers: you're getting pointers to just those nodes.  However 
when you *output* those nodes, they're being serialized with their 
children.  You can't directly break the node away from its children on 
serialization.  What you can do is for each node matched, construct a 
return clause that serializes the important data from the matched node 
(i.e. name, attribs, whatever).

With an engine that supports update you could do the update in place. 
With MarkLogic for example you could fetch the node, create an in memory 
copy, and remove all the children or selective descendants from the copy.

-jh-