cliffordanderson / xquery4humanists

Exercises for the XQuery Workshops at XQuery at DH2017

XQuery4Humanists

We're going to explore some fundamental concepts of XQuery and then try out some applications.

• 01-Introduction covers some fundamentals of XQuery.
• 02-Exploring-TEI-with-XQuery applies what we've learned about XQuery so far to the analysis of poetry and drama.
• 03-Accessing-JSON-with-XQuery illustrates the basics of accessing JSON with XQuery maps and arrays.
• 04-Integrating-CSV-and-JSON demonstrates how to convert between different formats like CSV, JSON, and XML.
• 05-Generating-JSON-and-CSV demonstrates how to generate formats like CSV and JSON from XML.
• 06-OPDS-OpenRefine-and-IIIF demonstrates opportunities for serving data into OPDS, OpenRefine, and IIIF.

Installation Instructions

You've got several options for an XQuery processor.

BaseX

BaseX is an open source XML database. I recommend downloading the Windows installer if you're using Windows and using Homebrew if you're on a Mac. The installation command is brew install basex.

Note: Installing BaseX may require that you update to Java 7. If so, install the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and try again.

eXist

eXist is another open source XML database. The latest release is 3.4.0. If you are on a Mac, you can also install with Homebrew: brew cask install exist-db. When you run for eXist for the first time, you'll need to set configuration settings. We recommend that you accept the defaults for now. After eXist starts, navigate to eXide, its browser-based query executive engine.

oXygen XML Editor

If you're using the oXygen XML editor, we're assuming that you're using Saxon PE (professional edition) v. 9.7.0.15 or later and that you've turned on support for XQuery 3.0. Check your settings to make sure we'll all on the same page.

xquery4humanists's Issues

Typo

In introduction.md, there's a typo:

There is also an expression called typeswitch that let's you branch on types rather than values.

"let's" should be "lets"

=) Thanks for the lesson!

missing books.xml ressource for chapter 05

Question about 01-introduction

Hey Cliff,

I was just giving the material a look over, and had one question: I wasn't quite clear what you're expecting the examples around lines 270-290 to return? Here they are:

let $ids :=
  <identifiers>
    <isbn num="13">978-0133507645</isbn>
    <isbn num="10">0133507645</isbn>
    <isbn num="13">978-0133507645</isbn>
  </identifiers>
where $ids/isbn/@num FIX ME! "13"
return $ids

let $ids :=
  <identifiers>
    <isbn num="13">978-0133507645</isbn>
    <isbn num="10">0133507645</isbn>
    <isbn num="13">978-0133507645</isbn>
  </identifiers>
where some $id in ($ids/isbn/@num) satisfies FIX ME!
return $ids

My guess is that a student would expect that their change would result in a filtered list - only the <isbn num="13"> entries. But nothing the student changes the where expression to would filter out the <isbn num="10"> entries from the results. No matter what, editing only the where clause will only result in the entire <identifiers> element or an empty sequence being returned.

As a result, I wasn't sure what you were trying to illustrate? Sorry if I was misreading anything.

Joe

map(*) cannot be serialized

Working on chapter 05, in the first serialization attempt using fn:serialize(),

Once we've succeeded in generating an XQuery map/array representation of our data, then all we need to generate the JSON representation of this data is to serialize , or write out, the results as JSON. To do this we could use the fn:serialize()

basex (8.6.5) gives me the error : [SENR0001] Items of type map(*) cannot be serialized
Does it really work for you (after correction on line 13, missing :=) ?

"Alternative lookup syntax"

Hi Cliff,

In 03, around line 470, there's this paragraph:

The extra work of finding the size of the array and iterating through its members is actually not necessary when we use the alternative lookup syntax. Can you rewrite this example with the lookup syntax?

I wasn't exactly sure what you meant by "alternative lookup syntax." Did you mean the ? lookup operator? Are you asking the student to write out a more verbose path rather than use map:find()?

Joe