Working With Operations Connector > Collecting and Mapping Topology Data > Use Topology Synchronization Rules to Map Data > Mapping Syntax > XPath Navigation > XPath Expressions and Example Values

XPath Expressions and Example Values

The following table lists typical XPath expressions and provides an example for each expression.

XPath Expression	Meaning	Example
`Caption`	Caption from CI	`PRD server 01`
`./Caption`	Caption from CI	`PRD server 01`
`/Caption`	Caption of the root (database) CIs	`PRD`
`../../Caption`	Selects the caption from the parent of the parent CI	`PRD`
`../RelationType`	Selects the parent relation type	`container_f`
`../../OMType`	Selects the parent of the parent type	`ACME_System`
`/OMType`	Selects type of the root CI	`ACME_System`
`//.[type=’WINOSSPI: Infrastructure’]/Caption`	Selects the caption of all CIs of type `WINOSSPI: Infrastructure`	`BLANTONS: Infrastructure`
`//Dependencies[type=’hosted_on’]/CI/Caption`	Selects the caption of all CIs with a `hosted_on` dependency	`BLANTONS`
`//Dependencies/CI/Caption`	Selects the caption of all CIs that have dependencies	`BLANTONS`

Note: If the Xpath expression selects a node below the starting database node, the “..” reads back one step. The following expression reads down to the node db and then links back to the starting database node.

//dependencies[type='hosted_on']/CI/../..

However, if the node db is the starting node, the expression ../.. follows the containment links of the node db, which is not the dependency relation that is shown in this example. The result depends on the parent container of the node, which is a different hierarchy.