XQuery from the Experts: A Guide to the W3C XML Query Language

User-Defined Functions

When a query becomes large and complex, it is often much easier to understand if it is divided into functions, and these functions can be reused in other parts of the query. For instance, we have seen a query that inverts a hierarchy to create a list of books by each author in a bibliography. It contained the following code:

for $b in doc("books.xml")/bib/book
where some $ba in $b/author satisfies
        ($ba/last=$l and $ba/first=$f)
order by $b/title
return $b/title

This code returns the titles of books written by a given author whose first name is bound to $f and whose last name is bound to $l. But you have to read all of the code in the query to understand that. Placing it in a named function makes its purpose clearer: