When dealing with XPath, an extra forward slash (/) can make the difference between your application performing and making the decision that XPath just isn’t the solution for you. So what is the difference between /Product and //Product? Huge.
/Product means “go find the Product element that are my children”. The engine only needs to look at child nodes relative to the current location.
//Product means “go find all of the Product elements that are a descendant of mine – I don’t care where they are at”. This means that if your document is 50 levels deep, the engine will look through each and every one of them to find a product element. If you have 10,000 elements to look through and then you have to go diving down the tree as well, it is obviously a more expensive than it needs to be.
Sometimes you don’t know where the element will reside in your XML document, so // makes sense. However, if you know where you are looking, you should always use /. Neither is “wrong”, but one can be a LOT more expensive than the other.
I’ve seen two XPath queries written today – one at work and one on the web, and both of them were using the inefficient double slash (//). I hope this helps anybody who is doing any querying using XPath.
