Graphical User Interface

Download

• First of all, download the latest version of BaseX.
• Next, download an XML document: factbook.xml (1.2 MB) contains statistical information on the worlds' countries. This file is also included in the Windows and ZIP distribution of BaseX.

Create Database

Select Database →’ New and browse to the factbook.xml document.

Next, choose the OK button, and BaseX will create a database that you can visually explore.
The introductory video gives you a glimpse of some features that the BaseX GUI provides.

Example Queries

Apart from the basic search facilities, BaseX offers far more sophisticated processing options to query your documents. Below are some examples you might give a try. This guide is far from being a comprehensive XQuery reference, but might point you in the right direction.

To execute the following queries, enter them in the XQuery Panel and hit the PLAY button.

XPath

XPath provides an easy facility to query your documents in a navigational manner. It is the basic tool of all node-related operations that you encounter when using XQuery. We will start with a trivial example and extend it to our needs.

Find all Countries

//country

tells BaseX to look for all country elements in the document. The query is introduced by two slashes //, which trigger the traversal of all document nodes. XPath knows several location steps that determine which nodes to consider next for evaluation.

As an example, //country is equivalent to /descendant::country.

Find the Names of all Countries

//country/name

This query returns the name children of all country elements. The result looks as follows:

<name>Albania</name>
<name>Andorra</name>
...

Find the Names of all Cities in Switzerland

The following query uses a predicate [...] to filter all country nodes which have a name child, the string value of which is "Switzerland":

//country[name = "Switzerland"]

To return all cities of the resulting element node, the query can be extended by a trailing //city path:

//country[name = "Switzerland"]//city

What's Next?

For more information on BaseX, XQuery and XPath, we invite you to...

• check out our Documentation, and
• have a look at the XQuery Tutorial at W3Schools.