XPath, XSLT and XQuery 4 - What’s in it for me?

As active members of the QT4 community group we would like to show and explain new important key concepts as well as smaller quality of life changes coming with XPath, XSLT and XQuery 4.0.

The session will be include hands-on tutorials in order to further familiarise with the above.

We will likely prepare small examples that can run in “fiddles” to illustrate the most important parts. This will also allow us to gather some feedback.

To give you some idea what this might entail (given we have enough time).

For XSLT

• Simple syntactic sugar additions
• xsl:if/(@then|@else), (xsl:when|xsl:otherwise)/@select, xsl:choose etc.
• Enclosed modes
• Declared item types
• Map and array construction
• Record types and xsl:record
• Templates with map and array type matching

For XPath / XQuery

• Additions to conditional syntax (otherwise, if without else)
• String templates (not string constructors)
• Additions to let and for
• Option arguments
• Context value
• The pipeline and the “arrowbang” operator
• Generalised nodes and lookup operators (JNodes)
• Additions to the type system: record and enum
• Explain map key order
• Destructuring statements
• New higher-order functions (do-until, partial-apply)
• JSON and CSV support
• New map and array functions
• fn:apply-templates