attributes by name instead of index

[skiflyer]

I'm using MSXML3.0 for VB...

I have an XML of this sort...

<root>
<product>
<name>blah</name>
<instance id=&quot;1&quot; active=&quot;true&quot;>
...
...
</instance>
<instance id=&quot;2&quot; active=&quot;false&quot;>
...
</instance>
</product>
<product>
...
...
</product>
</root>

And I'm fine getting into the right product, but once there I'd like to find the instance with the highest id where the active=&quot;true&quot;...

As it stands, I'm looping through the attributes and if their NodeName = &quot;id&quot; then I read it, and such.

My problem is that to do this I make a call to

node.Item(x).Attributes(0).nodeName
and then
node.Item(x).Attributes(0).text

and so on.... what worries me is the 0... I don't like having to worry about the order of my attributes and the fact that stuff is 0 indexed etc... I know I could loop through the whole list of attributes first (which is where I'm headed)... but this seems silly innacurate... what I'm hoping for is something like...

id = node.Item(x).Attributes(&quot;id&quot.text

Is there anyway to do this?

Thanks,
Rob

 

[palbano]

um why don't you get a node list using an xpath query (//product/instance[@active='true']) and then just iterate the list and keep the largest id?

-pete

 

[skiflyer]

cause I don't know how!

Going to look into this now, but if you have some information for me that'd be great.

-Rob

 

[palbano]

um you mean you don't know XPath?

If so u need to, that's what u use to do programatic DOM development. It's SQL to databases... try doing DB development without SQL.

Anyway ur using MSXML right? once u look at XPath statments then u use Node.selectNodes() and Node.selectSingleNode() to run an XPath query.

u should find XML developement much simpler in the future.

-pete

 

[skiflyer]

LOL

What've I'm been doing yesterday afternoon... this xpath stuff is so much easier.... thanks for the prod in the right direction, figuring things out nicely now. (scary I had it working before, just seemed to fragile for my liking... now that's no longer a worry)

-Rob