'''Example:'''
<syntaxhighlight lang="xquery">
declare %basex:lazy variable $january := doc('does-not-exist.xml');
if(month-from-date(current-date()) = 1) then $january else ()
</syntaxhighlight>
The annotation ensures that an error will is only be raised if the condition yields true. Without the annotation, the error would is always be raised as if the referenced document is not found.
==XQuery Locks==