Is there a maximum length for XPath Queries in MSXML?

Question

I'm planning to do a relatively large XPath query using msxml. Is there a maximum length for a query that msxml enforces?

Background: From some external input my code will create a number of xpath-queries and I am interested in the result of all those or-ed together:

   myObject.SelectNodes(subQuery1 +"|"+ subQuery2 +"|" + subQuery3 + "|" + ...)

I even don't know how many subqueries there will be at compile time, so I can' predict how long the query string will get.

I'd rather avoid calling SelectNodes multiple times for each subquery for I fear performance to be worse (COM Marshaling Overhead into MSXML, handling of several result trees as opposed to a single tree, etc.)

Answer 1

I've not come across any such limit and I doubt you could reach any limit before the shear cost of running the query would make it unfeasable anyway.