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Constructing the Mashup Result, Input or Intermediate Variables

You define the structure of the result that is returned from a mashup operation in these statements:

  • <constructor> to construct a well-formed document.

  • <appendresult> to add one or more well-formed items to a variable.

  • <select> (within <mashup>, <operation> or <macro>)

  • <select> within a <join> command to select specific items within a set of repeating items. See <join>.

  • <group> constructs repeating structures from sorted and optionally filtered node sets.

You can also use these statements to construct complex input parameters or any complex intermediate variable. You can construct the contents of variables (in <variable>) or input parameters (in <input>) using literal XML.

Literal XML Structures with Literal or Dynamic Data

You define the literal XML structure of the result or variables. This must be well-formed XML, completely enclosing the structure in a root node.

Important: It is a good practice to declare a namespace on the <mashup> element for your literal XML. Then use this namespace to differentiate literal XML from EMML markup.

Namespaces for literal XML are optional. If you omit a namespace for the literal XML in your mashup script, this also limits the validation that any XML editor provides within the literal XML. It has no effect on mashup processing.

You use literal values or dynamic mashup expressions to define the data that will fill this structure. See Dynamic Mashup Expressions for information on the syntax of these expressions.

You can also use XPath functions in these expressions to perform calculations or to cast data to another datatype.