Linking Saxon through to exist database

[Wolfgang]

> I've installed exist and using it's sandbox its working fine.

Since this is a product specific question, it should probably be 
discussed on the eXist mailing list. Anyway ...

> Can I connect a query to that database and use
> Saxon for the query engine?
> 
> http://localhost:8080/exist  is the http endpoint.
> 
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XQuery/Searching_multiple_collections
> shows using let $col-a := '/db/test/a'
> which is clearly incorrect for the file protocol?

You can access documents via HTTP using e.g.

http://localhost:8080/exist/rest/db/test/a/books.xml

Using this link within e.g. an XSLT will be ok (though not efficient for 
larger docs). BUT: collections are a different matter since different 
XQuery implementations use different concepts of what consitutes a 
collection.

http://localhost:8080/exist/rest/db/test/a

returns an XML fragment listing the collection contents. If you really 
need to, you could pre-process that somehow to include all collection 
member documents. But as I said, it might not be very efficient.

Wolfgang