XQuery

Controlling Namespace Declarations in Your Results

If you take the results of your query and serialize them as an XML document, you may be surprised by the way the namespace declarations appear. The number and location of namespace declarations in your results is not always intuitive. However, it can be controlled somewhat by how you declare namespaces in your query and by the use of settings in the prolog.

This section describes how you can control the appearance of namespace declarations in your results. None of these techniques affects the real meaning of the results; they are simply cosmetic. If you are unconcerned with the appearance of namespace declarations, you can skip this section.

In-Scope Versus Statically Known Namespaces

This chapter describes how you can declare namespaces in the prolog or in direct element constructors. Which one you choose will not affect the actual namespaces of the elements and attributes in the results. However, it can affect the way the results will be serialized, in particular the number and location of the namespace declarations.

The difference has to do with statically known namespaces and in-scope namespaces.

Statically known namespaces are all the namespaces that are known at any given point in a query. This includes the predeclared namespaces, those that were declared in the prolog, and those that were declared using a namespace declaration attribute in an element constructor that is in scope.

In-scope namespaces, on the other hand, ...