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i would like to get all XML nodes of given XSD type.

For example (see code snippets below)

  • for XSD type ListA, it should find only 1 node - MyLists/MyListA
  • for XSD type ItemType, it should find 4 nodes - 2x MyLists/MyListA/ItemA and 2x MyLists/MyListB/ItemB, but not nodes inside MyLists/MyListC/, because they are type of CustomItemType (although they have same name - type is different).

Is there a java library, that can provide this functionality?

Or any ideas how to solve this manually? The XSD can be very complex, with imports other schemas, etc. I was thinking about generate all possible xPaths to nodes with given type by traversing XSD schema (there will be no recursion) and then apply them on XML file and check if some nodes are found.

XSD example

<xs:schema xmlns:xs='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema' xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'> <xs:complexType name="ListA"> <xs:sequence> <xs:element name="ItemA" type="ItemType" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> <xs:complexType name="ListB"> <xs:sequence> <xs:element name="ItemB" type="ItemType" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> <xs:complexType name="AnotherList"> <xs:sequence> <xs:element name="ItemA" type="CustomItemType" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> <xs:element name="ItemB" type="CustomItemType" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> <xs:complexType name="ItemType"> <xs:sequence> <xs:element name="ID" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element name="Value" type="xs:string" /> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> <xs:complexType name="CustomItemType"> <xs:sequence> <xs:element name="ID" type="xs:string" /> <xs:element name="Value" type="xs:string" /> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> <xs:element name="MyLists"> <xs:complexType> <xs:sequence> <xs:element name="MyListA" type="ListA" /> <xs:element name="MyListB" type="ListB" /> <xs:element name="MyListC" type="AnotherList" /> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> </xs:element> </xs:schema>

XML example

<MyLists> <MyListA> <ItemA> <ID>1</ID> <Value>A1</Value> </ItemA> <ItemA> <ID>2</ID> <Value>A2</Value> </ItemA> </MyListA> <MyListB> <ItemB> <ID>1</ID> <Value>B1</Value> </ItemB> <ItemB> <ID>2</ID> <Value>B2</Value> </ItemB> </MyListB> <MyListC> <ItemA> <ID>1</ID> <Value>A1</Value> </ItemA> <ItemB> <ID>2</ID> <Value>B1</Value> </ItemB> </MyListC> </MyLists>
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  • One manual way to do it would be to use an XSVisitor to parse the xml document and schema at the same time. Heres an example of using an XSVisitor which you could adapt to your use case stackoverflow.com/questions/15417330/… Commented Jun 4, 2017 at 9:06

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You can solve that with schema-aware XPath 2.0 or later or schema-aware XQuery 1.0 or later by using a test like //element(*, YourGlobalTypeName) (https://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/#prod-xpath-ElementTest), so with your sample the test //element(*, ListA) returns one element and //element(*, ItemType) returns four elements. In the Java world schema-aware XPath 2.0/3.0/3.1 and XQuery 1.0/3.0/3.1 is supported by Saxon 9 EE, there are also various XQuery implementations like exist-db or basex but I am not sure whether they support schema-aware XQuery.

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Because Saxon 9 EE needs license for schema-aware xpaths 2.0, i have used Eclipse PsychoPath - it supports only XPath 2.0, not XQuery, but it was good enough for my project. - help.eclipse.org/luna/…

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