Phantastic, Martin - you made it work! Many thanks!

Could you help me fully understand the reason - so why exactly is

%output:method("xhtml")

essential? I would have thought that the reason is fully given by the serialization details. But from what you wrote I gather there is a second reason, which is the content-type header which is set dependent on %output-method? After reading your post I also found in the BaseX documentation:

"The next function, when called, generates XHTML headers, and text/html will be set as content type:"

Thanks again -

Hans-Jürgen

Am Freitag, 7. Januar 2022, 08:54:25 MEZ hat Martin Honnen <martin.honnen@gmx.de> Folgendes geschrieben:

Am 07.01.2022 um 08:39 schrieb Martin Honnen:

Am 07.01.2022 um 01:29 schrieb Hans-Juergen Rennau:

Hello,

I face a problem with RESTXQ of a fairly general character, as it seems to me.

When the XQuery functions of a RESTXQ application construct HTML pages, I expect these pages to behave exactly as a static page with the same content would behave. But sometimes this is not the case.

As an attachment I send an example. The "webapp" folder contains an XQuery module with a RESTXQ function [2], and the "html" folder contains an HTML page [3] which is identical to the page generated by the RESTXQ function [4]. This page has been copied from [1], and it demonstrates auto completion in an input field.

However, auto completion works only when calling the HTML file; it does not work when calling the RESTXQ application.

In both cases, the HTML page references a JS file as well as a CSS file, located in a sibling folder "static". An alert box as well as the appearance of the page prove that JS and CSS are found and used in both cases. And yet the behaviour is different ...

~~~

This problem appears to me important, as the trust in RESTXQ would be damaged if the generated HTML "may or may not" behave as it should. On the other hand, if the reason of the problem is understood and a workaround is available, all would be well.

I have not tried your code but if JavaScript fails in one result document but not in another then one reason could be that the JavaScript is written for text/html documents (as which static .html or htm documents are ususally served) while the code does not work right with XHTML served as application/xml or application/xhtml+xml.

So I would first check whether your RESTXQ where the script doesn't work is served as text/html or with an XML MIME type like the two ones I have mentioned, in the latter case I would indeed expect script attempts like

a = document.createElement("DIV")

to fail to achieve to create the right element as X(HT)ML is case-sensitive and works with a namespace so you would rather need

a = document.createElementNS("http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", "div")

in an X(HT)ML served with an XML mime type context.

So I think your XQuery code lacks %output:method("xhtml") e.g.

declare
     %rest:path("/demo-autocomplete")
     %rest:GET
    %output:method("xhtml")

function f:demoAutocomplete() as element() {