Basically the steps you need to follow are the following:
- Initialise Xerces XMLPlatformUtils
- Initialise a Parser and set its properties
- Use the parser to parse your xml file (parser->parseURI(xmlFile);)
- Once you've got the document parsed (DOMDocument), you can get the root node and then loop through its children nodes with functions like getChildNodes and getElementsByTagName.
You can start by looking at some of the examples in Xerces-c documentation (http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/samples-3.html). The DOMCount example could be a good starting point.