Chapter 30. XQuery

XQuery was originally devised as a query language for data stored in XML form in a database. The XQuery language enables you to select parts of the current message, when the message is in XML format. XQuery is a superset of the XPath language; hence, any valid XPath expression is also a valid XQuery expression.

You can pass an XQuery expression to xquery() in several ways. For simple expressions, you can pass the XQuery expressions as a string (java.lang.String). For longer XQuery expressions, you might prefer to store the expression in a file, which you can then reference by passing a java.io.File argument or a java.net.URL argument to the overloaded xquery() method. The XQuery expression implicitly acts on the message content and returns a node set as the result. Depending on the context, the return value is interpreted either as a predicate (where an empty node set is interpreted as false) or as an expression.

To use XQuery in your routes you need to add a dependency on camel-saxon to your project as shown in Example 30.1, “Adding the camel-saxon dependency”.

<!-- Maven POM File -->
...
<dependencies>
  ...
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
    <artifactId>camel-saxon</artifactId>
    <version>${camel-version}</version>
  </dependency>
  ...
</dependencies>

To use the xquery() static method in your application code, include the following import statement in your Java source files:

import static org.apache.camel.builder.saxon.XQueryBuilder.xquery;

Table 30.1, “XQuery variables” lists the variables that are accessible when using XQuery.

Example 30.2, “Route using XQuery” shows a route that uses XQuery.

<camelContext>
  <route>
    <from uri="activemq:MyQueue"/>
    <filter>
      <language langauge="xquery">/foo:person[@name='James']</language>
      <to uri="mqseries:SomeOtherQueue"/>
    </filter>
  </route>
</camelContext>