Config <set-variable> with xpath gives empty string while extracting from xml payload

Question

I am working on a service which add the detials sent in the request to to two different queues.

For this I use to extract part of the XML without disturbing the payload. But it is giving blank.

My input looks as below

<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns="http://example.org/HelloService">
   <soapenv:Header/>
   <soapenv:Body>
     <AddRequest>
      <Person>
         <firstName>Test</firstName>
         <lastName>Tesst</lastName>
         <age>23</age>
      </Person>
      <Company>
         <companyName>Test</companyName>
         <state>Tesst</state>
         <zip>12345</zip>
      </Company>
     </AddRequest>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

And part of my flow which is extracting the Person element is as below.

    <set-variable value="#[xpath://Person]" variableName="person"></set-variable>

    <logger level="INFO" message="#[flowVars['person']]" />     
    ........
    ......

But the logger is printing it as blank

2013-01-30 12:56:08,287 INFO  [HelloService.stage1.02] processor.LoggerMessageProcessor (LoggerMessageProcessor.java:108) - 

Any idea why it is extracting blank space instead of the xml element.

How can I get the "Person" element from the paylaod using XPATH?

Answer 1

Try using the XSLT transformer to extract the xml element.

<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes" />

<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:copy copy-namespaces="no">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="//Person" />                   
    </xsl:copy>     
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
    <xsl:copy copy-namespaces="no">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()" />                  
    </xsl:copy>     
</xsl:template>

Answer 2

Use this:

<set-variable value="#[xpath('//Person')]" variableName="person" />

EDIT:

<set-variable value="#[xpath('//Person').text]" variableName="person" />

will return text value of an element, if it has one.