On a recent project, I ran into a problem with an XML document, that had to be enclosed within another XML document, generated from a database query. The problem I ran into was the character encoding of the XMLElement function, which eventually was worked around with UPDATEXML.

In this blog post I would like to share with you several attempts to solve this problem, why they failed and the final solution to the problem.

Printing of official documents happened in a separate printing module. Whenever a document needed to be printed, an XML document was generated in a database query and sent to the printing module. Most of the data came from relational database tables, but pieces of standard text were supplied as XML documents by another party… and saved in our database in an XMLType column based on CLOB storage.

Our printing module expected to find these standard text XML documents within a tag in our generated XML document. Also both XML documents, our generated XML and the supplied XML, had different namespaces, this needed to maintained this way. The Oracle database version we were working with was 10.1.0.5.0.

In this post I will use a simplified version of the real XML More >