Firstly before I wade in with my problem I'll introduce myself as I'm new here. I'm an automation software engineer from the UK. There is an ever increasing trend in industry to integrate the automation data requirements with those at the enterprise level. More increasingly we are becomming involved with SQL Server and devloping VB NET front ends for these.

I'm working through an example from Professional VB.NET 2nd Edition. The problem I'm experiencing realates to parsing an XML document. The XML I'm parsing is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<StoredProcedures>
  <StoredProcedure name="usp_Get_Authors_By_States">
    <Parameters>
      <Parameter name="@states" size="100" datatype="VarChar" direction="spParamInput" isNullable="True" />
    </Parameters>
  </StoredProcedure>
</StoredProcedures>

The VB NET code exampl buidls a XPath Query string as follows:

strXPathQuery = "/StoredProcedures/StoredProcedure/[@name='" _
& strSPName & "']/Parameters/Parameter"

Where strSPName is the name of the a Stored Procedure whose parameters I wish the get at.

it's the [@name='" & strSPName & "'] that's causing the problem. There will certainly be more than one StoredProcedure in my XML file so the requirement to pass include a placeholder for any stored procedure in this path query is essential. I am confident that the problem is here because when a remove the reference to the stored procedure in works fine (there is only one in the XML file, for now) i.e.

"/StoredProcedures/StoredProcedure/Parameters/Parameter"

works fine.

Does anyone have any idea where I'm going wrong

But you don't say what the problem is...
Does it not return the correct node, no node or what?
What are you passing in for the name of the parameter, try outputting the XPath before calling it to make sure it is correct.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

/StoredProcedures/StoredProcedure/[@name='" _ & strSPName & "']

You don't need that "/" before the "[". A predicate is part of a step in a path expression, not a step in its own right.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference