The Tamino forms handler allows database queries to be automatically constructed using the values in multiple fields of an HTML form.
The commands used for building and sending a query to Tamino are very similar to those required for creating an XML document.
To compose a query and send it to Tamino, encode the following into the HTML form:
The name of the database and collection to be queried;
The fact that you want to compose a query (rather than create an XML document);
The query itself.
The following example illustrates the principle:
This is the same as for creating an XML document, as described above.
To indicate that you want to use the HTML form to compose a query, use the following code in the HTML form:
<input type=hidden name="_HTMLreq" value="_XQL">
A query consists of node selectors and filters. A node selector specifies the family of elements to be retrieved. A filter specifies a required subset of the elements (i.e. the part of a query that is enclosed in square brackets "[" and "]").
The node selector is specified in an HTML input statement
with the following syntax:
<input type=hidden name="XQLNode" value="NodeAddress">
where NodeAddress is an XPath expression that identifies the location of the element within the document.
The filter is specified in another HTML input statement for
a field that is visible in the browser.
<input type=hidden name="XQLNode" value="patient"> <input type="text" size="30" name="name/surname~">
This generates a query of the form
/patient[name/surname~="ValueOfInputEntry"]
where ValueOfInputEntry stands for the value that you type in to the input field in the browser.
Note:
the "~" character in this example. This
can be used to perform a search using the X-Query contains
operator for the given string.
