XPath expressions

WebSphere Commerce uses WebSphere Commerce extended XPath notation as the query language to identify the parts of the logical model you want to query. XPath is an industry standard language for addressing parts of an XML document, and the WebSphere Commerce extended XPath notation has some extensions to this standard.

The XML documents being addressed by the extended XPath notation are Nouns, which are converted to a Java class called a Service Data Object (SDO). SDO properties can be represented as attributes (in simple case such as String) or as elements (when its properties reference another SDO object). Usually this XML document is governed by a XML schema which defines the allowable content and semantics. These SDO objects and XML schema form the WebSphere Commerce logical model.

When using XPath expressions to query an XML document, WebSphere Commerce does not use the Java XPath APIs. When you run a query with an XPath expression, WebSphere Commerce maps the XPath expression to an SQL template (query template file). WebSphere Commerce uses this SQL template to generate the SQL query that performs the actual database query.