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Developing with XCC

Evaluating JavaScript Queries

You can use AdhocQuery and Session.submitRequest to evaluate either XQuery or Server-Side JavaScript queries on MarkLogic Server. By default, XCC assumes the query language is XQuery. Use RequestOptions.setQueryLanguage to specify JavaScript instead. For example:

// Create a query that is Server-Side JavaScript
AdhocQuery request = 
    session.newAdhocQuery("cts.doc('/my/uri')");
// Set the query language to JavaScript
RequestOptions options = new RequestOptions();
options.setQueryLanguage("javascript");
// Submit the query
request.setOptions(options);
ResultSequence rs = session.submitRequest(request);

You can the results of your query in the usual way. When a ResultItem in the result sequence is a JsonItem, you can extract the item as Jackson JsonNode and use the Jackson library functions to traverse and access the structure.

Note that there is a difference between returning native JavaScript objects and arrays returning JSON nodes from the database:

  • A JavaScript object or array corresponds to an atomic result item type. That is, the underlying value type is JS_OBJECT or JS_ARRAY, and ItemType.isAtomic returns true.

  • A JSON node, such as the result of calling cts.doc() or the output from calling a NodeBuilder method, has a node value type. That is, a value type such as OBJECT_NODE, ARRAY_NODE, BOOLEAN_NODE, NUMBER_NODE, or NULL_NODE. Also, ItemType.isNode returns true.

In most cases, your code can ignore this distinction because you can use Jackson to manipulate both kinds of results transparently through the JsonItem interface. For details, see Working with JSON Content.

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