Motivation

You have data stored in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Since Google docs has an RSS feed for their data you can use this service to get well-formed XML about your spreadsheet directly from XQuery.

Method

You can use the base URL of 'https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/' to list the data in a public spreadsheet.

let $base-uri := 'https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/'
let $document-id := '0AsuPP847sJrUdEdwcVdHeUZ1Sm80dEc1eWZHQkwyZlE'
let $suffix := '/od6/public/basic'

you can concat these three strings together and wrap them in an xs:anyURI type to get the document using the httpcleint:get() function.

Example Code

xquery version "1.0";
declare namespace atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";

let $http-get :=
   httpclient:get(
     xs:anyURI(
        'https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/0AsuPP847sJrUdEdwcVdHeUZ1Sm80dEc1eWZHQkwyZlE/od6/public/basic'),
     true(), ())
 
 return
 <results>
    Number Entries: { count($http-get//atom:entry) }
 </results>

Which returns:

   <results>Number Entries: 455</results>

References

This example was posted on the eXist mailing list in April of 2014 by Dr. Andreas Wagner.