SQL Server XML Query element without children

Question

I got the following XML:

<Node attr1="value1" attr2="value2">
    <SubNode SubAttr1="subValue1" subAttr2="subValue2" />
</Node>

I would like to know if there is a way to do a XQuery expression to return only the <Node> element.

<Node attr1="value1" attr2="value2"> <Node>

Answer 1

I'm sorry you're out of luck here for a general solution – if you're bound to use Microsoft SQL Server, which does not offer computed element constructors with names that are computed on the fly (like @dirkk is using).

When you know that this element is always called "Node", you can do following (using a fixed node name):

element Node { /Node/@* }

If you also want to include (direct) text children:

element Node { /Node/@*, /Node/text() }

If you need to support arbitrary element names: you cannot do this with XQuery in SQL Server.

Answer 2

You can write a function to do this:

declare function local:strip-children($e as element()*) as element()* {
  element {node-name($e)} {$e/@*}
};

local:strip-children(/Node)

Of course you can also do this without a function like so:

element {node-name(/node)} {/Node/@*}

So you simply inline the code from the function. However, in my opinion the function approach is much more reusable.