Syntax

Purpose

XMLAgg is an aggregate function. It takes a collection of XML fragments and returns an aggregated XML document. Any arguments that return null are dropped from the result.

XMLAgg is similar to SYS_XMLAgg except that XMLAgg returns a collection of nodes but it does not accept formatting using the XMLFormat object. Also, XMLAgg does not enclose the output in an element tag as does SYS_XMLAgg.

Within the order_by_clause, Oracle Database does not interpret number literals as column positions, as it does in other uses of this clause, but simply as number literals.

Examples

The following example produces a Department element containing Employee elements with employee job ID and last name as the contents of the elements:

SELECT XMLELEMENT("Department",
   XMLAGG(XMLELEMENT("Employee", 
   e.job_id||' '||e.last_name)
   ORDER BY last_name))
   as "Dept_list"     
   FROM employees e
   WHERE e.department_id = 30;

Dept_list
-------------------------------------------------------------
<Department>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Baida</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Colmenares</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Himuro</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Khoo</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_MAN Raphaely</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Tobias</Employee>
</Department>

The result is a single row, because XMLAgg aggregates the rows. You can use the GROUP BY clause to group the returned set of rows into multiple groups:

SELECT XMLELEMENT("Department",
      XMLAGG(XMLELEMENT("Employee", e.job_id||' '||e.last_name)))
   AS "Dept_list"
   FROM employees e
   GROUP BY e.department_id;

Dept_list
---------------------------------------------------------
<Department>
  <Employee>AD_ASST Whalen</Employee>
</Department>

<Department>
  <Employee>MK_MAN Hartstein</Employee>
  <Employee>MK_REP Fay</Employee>
</Department>

<Department>
  <Employee>PU_MAN Raphaely</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Khoo</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Tobias</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Baida</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Colmenares</Employee>
  <Employee>PU_CLERK Himuro</Employee>
</Department>
. . .