XML TYPE

Description of XMLType

XMLType is a system-defined opaque type for handling XML data. XMLType has predefined member functions on it to extract XML nodes and fragments.

You can create columns of XMLType and insert XML documents into it. You can also generate XML documents as XMLType instances dynamically using the SYS_XMLGEN and SYS_XMLAGG SQL functions.

For example,

CREATE TABLE Xml_tab ( xmlval xmltype);

INSERT INTO Xml_tab VALUES (
   xmltype('<?xml version="1.0"?>
               <EMP>
                  <EMPNO>221</EMPNO>
                  <ENAME>John</ENAME>
               </EMP>'));

INSERT INTO Xml_tab VALUES (
   xmltype('<?xml version="1.0"?>
               <PO>
                  <PONO>331</PONO>
                  <PONAME>PO_1</PONAME>
               </PO>'));
-- now extract the numerical values for the employee numbers

SELECT e.xmlval.extract('//EMPNO/text()').getNumVal() as empno
   FROM Xml_tab
   WHERE e.xmlval.existsnode('/EMP/EMPNO')  = 1;