How to check if an element exists in the xml using xpath?

Question

Below is my element hierarchy. How to check (using xpath) that AttachedXml element is present under CreditReport of Primary

Answer 1

The Saxon documentation, though a little unclear, seems to suggest that the JAXP XPath API will return false when evaluating an XPath expression if no matching nodes are found.

This IBM article mentions a return value of null when no nodes are matched.

You might need to play around with the return types a bit based on this API, but the basic idea is that you just run a normal XPath and check whether the result is a node / false / null / etc.

XPathFactory xpathFactory = XPathFactory.newInstance(NamespaceConstant.OBJECT_MODEL_SAXON);
XPath xpath = xpathFactory.newXPath();
XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile("/Consumers/Consumer/DataSources/Credit/CreditReport/AttachedXml");
Object result = expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODE);

if ( result == null ) {
    // do something
}