Miscellaneous

This section describes miscellaneous functions that are available in expressions.

deserialize

Converts the text of a given string into an XML document.

Syntax

    deserialize(string)

Parameters

string is an XPath expression that evaluates to a string value.

Returns

An org.w3c.dom.Document value that represents the XML document.

is-null

Determines whether a node in the process data model exists.

In XPath, null values are represented as empty string values.

Syntax

    is-null(node)

Parameters

node is an XPath expression that evaluates to a node in the process data model.

Returns

A boolean value of true if the node does not exist, and false if the node exists.

Example

The name of a string variable that a process includes is stringVar. The following expression returns false :

is-null(/process_data/@stringVar)

serialize

Returns the string representation of given XML code. You can specify whether the string includes the XML declaration as the first line.

Syntax

    serialize(node,bOmitXML)

Parameters

A node and an optional boolean bOmitXML . node is an XPath expression that evaluates to a data location that stores XML data. If a value of true() is provided for bOmitXML , the first line in the string representation includes the XML declaration. If bOmitXML is false() , the XML declaration is not included. If bOmitXML is not specified, the XML declaration is provided.

Returns

A string that represents the contents of the given node.

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