MarkLogic Cookbook

Part I. Implementing XQuery: Practical Solutions to Real-World Problems

In this first part, we are covering XQuery recipes. For much of MarkLogic’s history, XQuery was the primary language used to interact with MarkLogic (in 2015, MarkLogic added support for JavaScript). This W3C-standard functional language is well-suited for working with hierarchical data structures, like XML, which in turn is a descriptive medium for describing document data.

Recipes are a useful way to distill simple solutions to common problems—copy and paste these into MarkLogic’s Query Console or your source code, and you’ve solved the problem. In choosing recipes for this part, I looked for a couple of factors. First, I wanted problems that occur with some frequency. Some problems in this part are more common than others, but all occur often enough in real-world situations that one of my colleagues wrote down a solution. Second, I looked for techniques that aren’t commonly known, such as using the fn:fold-left function when working with a sequence of maps. Finally, some recipes require explanations that provide insight into how to approach programming with MarkLogic. Each recipe provides some combination of these factors.

Developers will get the most value from these recipes and the accompanying discussions after they’ve worked with MarkLogic for at least a few months and built an application or two. If you’re just getting started, I suggest spending some time on MarkLogic University classes first, then ...