Help with tokenize

[ghost]

I'll upload what I have so far. How do I separate the years? It is coming out as all one long number.

[ebeshero]

@SparkTheDragon Yikes--somehow you are retrieving EVERY date in every single collection in eXist-db. (I didn't realize you could do that!) Remember that you need to use your collection variable to isolate a specific collection and walk down the tree from there. When you define the $date variable as starting with //, that's evidently getting ALL the collections.

Also you're going to need a for loop to treat the dates one-by-one.

[ghost]

When I change //date to /date there is no output. hmmmm

[ebeshero]

@SparkTheDragon You've written XQuery before that begins with a collection()... Remember why you define that collection variable in the first place, so you refer to it? The solution here is NOT to start your expression with a forward slash at all.

[ebeshero]

@SparkTheDragon So, you defined a collection with:

declare variable $banksyColl := collection('/db/Assignments/banksyForSVG/');

You need to refer to that variable, $banksyColl when you are trying to find the dates in that collection...

[ghost]

I did try to refer to that variable but now I do not get any dates. I get a string of the same sentence over and over again.

[ebeshero]

@SparkTheDragon Did you save this in eXist-db? Let me try looking at it in your folder. Also, what's your preferred T-shirt size? (I'm about to phone the T-shirt people with our class order.)

[ebeshero]

@SparkTheDragon I saved the starter XQuery that we wrote together in class on Wednesday in our eXist-db, so how about picking that up and running with it? You could at least compare notes--that XQuery is successfully pulling from the Banksy collection. Find it in our eXist-db here: /db/2019_ClassExamples/banksyTimelineStarter.xql

[ghost]

So sorry I didn't get back to you about my size. I am a medium, but Im sure I can squeeze into whatever.

[ghost]

Also, yea it is saved in my dtd21 folder.

[ebeshero]

@SparkTheDragon I'm not seeing it there--though I can see your other XQuery exercises...Can you make sure you save it? (Make sure you're logged in to eXist when you do.)

[ghost]

hmmm alright

[ghost]

my plan is to integrate my loops into the file you uploaded

[ebeshero]

This is what I see in your directory:

[ebeshero]

@SparkTheDragon You'll only need the one loop that we started in class (reflected in my file). You just need to loop through each year and find the <sourceDesc> elements in the Banksy collection that match up with that year. That's the tricky part. Once you've found those, you can return titles in each year, counts of titles per year, whether they're spray_paint or canvas, etc.

[ghost]

SVG2 is the one I was working on. And alright, I'll work on that loop.

[ebeshero]

@SparkTheDragon I just had a look at "SVG2" and left you a comment there. You had a for-loop set up like this:

for $date in $banksyColl

That won't work to retrieve dates, because the for-loop just breaks a sequence into parts. In this case $banksyColl is a sequence of document nodes (each of the whole XML documents in the Banksy collection), so your $date is just returning entire files, not dates.

To retrieve the dates, we set a global variable reaching into the $banksyColl//sourceDesc//date/@when/string(). We then used the tokenize function to retrieve just the year portion of the ISO-formatted yyyy-mm-dd dates by breaking on the hyphens (and that works even if there aren't any hyphens). We wrote all that code together in class on Wednesday, so you'll see it in my code saved in the database.