XPath Property

Provides a way to point to a specific element in the response.

Syntax

[VB.NET]
Public Property XPath As String

[C#]
public string XPath {get; set;}

Remarks

This property provides a way to point to a specific element in the response. This property implements a subset of the XML XPath specification, allowing you to point to specific elements in the XML documents.

The path is a series of one or more element accessors separated by '/'. The path can be absolute (starting with '/') or relative to the current XPath location.

The following are possible values for an element accessor:

When XPath is set to a valid path, XElement points to the name of the element, with XParent, XNamespace, XPrefix, XChildren, and XText providing other properties of the element. The attributes of the current element will be contained in the Attributes collection .

BuildDOM must be set to True prior to parsing the document for the XPath functionality to be available.

Example (Setting XPath)

Document root
RestControl.XPath = "/"
Specific Element
RestControl.XPath = "/root/SubElement1/SubElement2/"
i-th Child
RestControl.XPath = "/root/[i]"

For JSON data, this will be the path to a specified value within the document. Since arrays in JSON only contain values, and no associated object name, an empty name will be used for these values. Thus, to reach an array element at position 1, the path must be set to "[1]". In addition, a root element named "json" will be added to each JSON document in the parser. Following is an example:

Simple JSON document

{
  "firstlevel": {
    "one": "value",
    "two": ["first", "second"],
    "three": "value three"
  }
}

 Document root    
RestControl.XPath = "/"
 Specific Element 
RestControl.XPath = "/json/firstlevel/one/"
 i-th Child      
RestControl.XPath = "/json/firstlevel/two/[i]/"

Default Value

""