objects in xquery?

[bryan rasmussen]

Hi,

I have a situation where I want to get a certain number of parameters,
and if the parameters do not exist or are empty to use a default
string value instead, something like:



 declare function test:mappath() as xs:string{

 if(request:get-parameter("path", ()) !='')
 then
   request:get-parameter("path", ())
 else
   "demos"


 };

as a general rule though in other server side languages what I like to
do when doing this kind of thing is to compose an object that holds
the values, some example pseudocode:

x as object();
x{
path="demos";
page="page1.xml";



}

then a function (have used the same structure as the xquery function
above but obviously syntactically is not xquery)

getparam(param){
 if(request:get-parameter(param, ()) !='')
 then
   request:get-parameter(param, ())
 else
   x[param]


 }
then I can just do
path = getparam("path")
and so forth.


So I would like to know if this kind of thing is possible in Xquery.
Perhaps what to do is to build a function that returns XML and then
use xpath to get at the value in that function?
If possible it would nice if someone had an example of the way to do
the thing above?

Thanks,
Bryan Rasmussen