om.DomNode.selectByPath

Finds descendant DOM nodes from an XPath-like pattern.

Syntax

selectByPath(
   path STRING )
  RETURNS om.NodeList

path is an XPath-like pattern.

Usage

The selectByPath() method scans the DOM tree for descendant nodes from the specified XPath-like pattern.

Important:

The selectByPath() method supports a limited XPath syntax.

The search pattern must always start with / or //, must contain at least on tag name, and the attributes expression allows only equality comparison.

The pattern supported by selectByPath() is limited to the following syntax:

{ / | // } TagName [ [@AttributeName="Value"] ] [...]

DOM node tag names and attributes names are case-sensitive.

The method creates a list of nodes as an om.NodeList object. This list object is then used to process the nodes found.

Table 1. XPath examples
XPath expression	Description
`/Vehicle`	The element `<Vehicle/>`.
`//Vehicle`	All `<Vehicle/>` elements.
`//Transport/Vehicle`	All `<Vehicle/>` elements that are children of `<Transport/>` elements.
`//Transport//Engine`	All `<Engine/>` elements that are arbitrary descendants of `<Transport/>` elements.
`//Transport/*/Engine`	All `<Engine/>` elements that are grandchildren of `<Transport/>` elements.
`//Transport/*`	All elements that are children of `<Transport/>` elements.
`//Engine[@power="185"]`	All `<Engine/>` elements where the `power` attribute equals `185`.
`//Vehicle[@type="car"]/Engine[@power="185"]`	All `<Engine/>` elements where the `power` attribute equals `185`, children of `<Vehicle/>` elements where the `type` attribute is `"car"`.

Example

DEFINE node om.DomNode,
       nodelist om.NodeList
...
LET nodelist = node.selectByPath("//Grid/Table[@tabName=\"t1\"]")

For a complete example, see Example 2: Search nodes by XPath.