If you have a varchar field you can easily do SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE ColumnA LIKE '%Test%' to see if that column contains a certain string.
How do you do that for XML Type?
I have the following which returns only rows that have a 'Text' node but I need to search within that node
select * from WebPageContent where data.exist('/PageContent/Text') = 1
Yet another option is to cast the XML as nvarchar, and then search for the given string as if the XML vas a nvarchar field.
SELECT *
FROM Table
WHERE CAST(Column as nvarchar(max)) LIKE '%TEST%'
I love this solution as it is clean, easy to remember, hard to mess up, and can be used as a part of a where clause.
This might not be the best performing solution, so think twice before deploying it to production. It is however very useful for a quick debug session, which is where I mostly use it.
EDIT: As Cliff mentions it, you could use:
...nvarchar if there's characters that don't convert to varchar
You should be able to do this quite easily:
SELECT *
FROM WebPageContent
WHERE data.value('(/PageContent/Text)[1]', 'varchar(100)') LIKE 'XYZ%'
The .value method gives you the actual value, and you can define that to be returned as a VARCHAR(), which you can then check with a LIKE statement.
Mind you, this isn't going to be awfully fast. So if you have certain fields in your XML that you need to inspect a lot, you could:
With this, you'd basically "extract" a certain portion of the XML into a computed field, make it persisted, and then you can search very efficiently on it (heck: you can even INDEX that field!).
Marc
WITH XMLNAMESPACES clause in T-SQL - it lets you define the XML namespaces involved, and you can use their prefixes in your T-SQL codeAnother option is to search the XML as a string by converting it to a string and then using LIKE. However as a computed column can't be part of a WHERE clause you need to wrap it in another SELECT like this:
SELECT * FROM
(SELECT *, CONVERT(varchar(MAX), [COLUMNA]) as [XMLDataString] FROM TABLE) x
WHERE [XMLDataString] like '%Test%'
This is what I am going to use based on marc_s answer:
SELECT
SUBSTRING(DATA.value('(/PAGECONTENT/TEXT)[1]', 'VARCHAR(100)'),PATINDEX('%NORTH%',DATA.value('(/PAGECONTENT/TEXT)[1]', 'VARCHAR(100)')) - 20,999)
FROM WEBPAGECONTENT
WHERE COALESCE(PATINDEX('%NORTH%',DATA.value('(/PAGECONTENT/TEXT)[1]', 'VARCHAR(100)')),0) > 0
Return a substring on the search where the search criteria exists
The correct way to do this is to use the contains() XQuery predicate
SELECT *
FROM WebPageContent wpc
WHERE wpc.data.exist('/PageContent/Text/text()[contains(., "Test")]') = 1;
