How to run xquery dynamically on file listing from directory

[Kevin Grover]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 11:22 AM,  <http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk> wrote:
> I'm a complete newbie at xquery and am trying to execute a query dynamically on
>  all files in a given directory, rather than hardcoding a particular file into
>  the 'doc()' call.  I've tried using 'collection()' but am unclear as to how to
>  get it to work.
>
>  I did see this thread on x-query.com:
>   Query Through Multiple Files
>  but the closest anyone came to the answer I was hoping to find was to hardcode a
>  *list* of files to traverse.
>
>  Is there anyway to do something like:
>     for $x in collection("xmlfiles")
>  where 'xmlfiles' is a subdirectory containing the actual xml files I want to
>  use?  I would need to know the exact syntax, as this is all new to me.
>
>  Thanks!

I feel for you on this.  It's taken me weeks to figure anything out.
The crux if it is that the 'collection()' function is implementation
dependent.

I've been trying with saxon for a long while and could not find any
documentation or examples.  After many attempts at searching (Google),
 and some dumb luck (I searched the main saxon documentation toc  for
collection), I found saxon's documentation page:

http://www.saxonica.com/documentation/sourcedocs/collections.html

Still, no examples, but better.  From that page, I think I can
probably get my stuff going.  What I wanted to do at the time was more
of a small itch than and real need, so I tended to look into it
somewhat shallowly and sporadialy.

NOTE: I was stuck with a non Internet connected machine, so I had to
search later, from other machines.  I tried downloading the saxon
documentation, but all seemed incomplete.  I grabbed saxon9, and just
recently grabbed it's doc distro, but have not tried to search it for
this.  Maybe I will.  I would (personally) like to see the Saxon
Documentation rendered into many forms (PDF, HTML, CHM) from something
like DocBook.  It would also be _very_ helpful if there were more
examples.  I've been meaning to ask if I could help do this (at least
to convert the HTML documentation tree to DocBook), but never got
around to it.

If you're using an all-in-one editor, you'll have to dig into it to
see what back end they use.  I believe oXygen XML uses Saxon (but I'm
not certain).

This is one of those things that seems sort of simple when I find the
answer, but was completely baffling beforehand - particularly since I
could not seem to find anything online.

- Kevin