RE: creation order vs. document order

Hi Jan,

I don't know about the formal semantics, but the main language spec defines
the behavior quite clearly.

Document order doesn't play a role in your query.  FLWOR does not
automatically apply document ordering to its result.  For example, the query

let $tree := (<y id="1"/>, <y id="2"/>)
return $tree[2], $tree[1]

always results in
<y id="2"/><y id="1"/>

When ordering a FLWOR that has no "order by" clause, all that matters are
the orders of the for bindings.  This is explained in section 3.8.1 of the
current spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/#id-for-let  


Completely separately from this, every node in the data model is ordered
relative to every other one.  Your query happens to be creating a sequence
of c elements, each in its own fragment.  Consider the two queries below:

let $tree1 := (<x><y/><y/></x>)/y
return $tree1[1] << $tree1[2]

always returns true.  The two y child elements of x are siblings of one
another, and the first one always comes before the second in document order.
However, this query:

let $tree2 := (<y/>, <y/>)
return $tree[1] << $tree[2]

may return true or false (and the result may even vary when executed
multiple times on the same implementation).  The two y elements are
unrelated to one another.  Each resides in a different fragment, and the
relative order of nodes in different fragments is implementation-dependent
(but stable within the execution of a single query).

See section 2.3.1 of the current spec http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/#N108C2


[Combine them into a single query:

let $unrelated := (<y/>, <y/>)
let $related := (<x>{$unrelated}</x>)/y
return $related[1] << $related[2],    (: always true :)
       $unrelated[1] << $unrelated[2] (: implementation-dependent :)

and you have one of the examples from my book.]



Hope that helps,

Michael Brundage
xquery@comcast.net

Writing as
Author, "XQuery: The XML Query Language" (Addison-Wesley, to appear 2003)
Co-author, "Professional XML Databases" (Wrox Press, 2000)

not as
Technical Lead
Common Query Runtime/XML Query Processing
WebData XML Team
Microsoft


-----Original Message-----
From: www-ql-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ql-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Jan
Hidders
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 6:35 AM
To: www-ql@w3.org
Subject: creation order vs. document order



L.S.,

I have a question regarding the place in the document order of newly 
created element nodes. Suppose I have a join-like query like the following:

   for $a in $list1
   for $b in $list2
   where $a/name = $b/name
   return <c> $a, $b </c>

Must the result of this always be a list that is sorted in document 
order? Intuitively I would expect them to be sorted in the order in 
which they were created, but as far as I can tell the formal semantics 
leaves this unspecified.

-- 
    Jan Hidders

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Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2003 10:58:30 UTC