Jackrabbit XPath Issue

Question

I'm relatively new to Jackrabbit. In our application we never turned on SearchIndex section within repository.xml (so as workspace.xml) files because we always go directly to a given document using the JCR UUID reference. We are using Jackrabbit v2.2.1 and Oracle as the repository. Now our requirements are getting expanded as we would like to use the document metadata feature to store contextual info about a document so that we can use the metadata to retrieve a selected set of documents.

As the first step, I added the default SearchIndex section in workspace.xml file and restarted the JCR.

I saw a bunch of lines like this in my log file - then I saw it created the index folder under workspace area.

2011-07-05 15:04:01.724 INFO [WebContainer : 0] MultiIndex.java:1204 indexing... /vfs:metaData/21ee130e-978e-415f-bfd1-7aa03d91608c/vfs:attributes (3500)

I have the folder structure like this. When I create a document in JCR, I specify the metadata info as part of the document which is by a complex XSD type with tags like docType, uploadedBy, contextValue, etc.

/ (root)
  /MyApp (sub-folder) 
      /documents/ (sub-folder) 
         /document-1.pdf (file) 
         /document-2.pdf (file) 
     /accounts/ (sub-folder) 
         /account.txt (file) 
        etc...

The following XPath expression works.

//jcr:root/vfs:metaData//*[vfs:attributes/vfs:docType='TAX_DOCS']

If I give wrong value, for example instead of 'TAX_DOCS', 'TAX', it returns no documents as expected which is great. This proves that the metadata is correctly stored as expected and it is used in the filter process correctly.

The problem with this query is that it starts searching from the root folder but I want to search from /MyApp/documents sub-folder only. So I tried this:

//jcr:root/MyApp/documents//vfs:metaData//*[vfs:attributes/vfs:docType='TAX_DOCS']

It returns nothing. Then I tried this too but no success.

//jcr:root/MyApp/documents//*[vfs:metaData/vfs:attributes/vfs:docType='TAX_DOCS']

So what am I doing wrong? Is anything in workspace.xml configuration that we need to set or missing?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks, Jack

Jukka Zitting Jukka Zitting · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-07T16:05:38

Drop the double slashed from anything but the last path component and use the @ notation for the attribute value, resulting in:

/jcr:root/MyApp/documents//*[vfs:attributes/@vfs:docType='TAX_DOCS']

The // construct looks for the whole subtree instead of just the immediate children like / does. The JCR specification only requires implementations to support the // construct as the last step of the XPath query.

Jackrabbit XPath Issue

1 Answers