XPath with XmlFile (PsiFile)

There is no support for XPath searches directly in the XML PSI API. You can look at how the XPath plugin implements its actions for XPath evaluation (XPathEvalAction) but generally that's an approach that's targeted for users, not plugin developers.

I don't have that class in my source files, and thats weird because I can see it in some imports :

import org.intellij.plugins.xpathView.XPathEvalAction;

I have a helper for searching an xpath right now:

public static List<Element> findXpath(File xmlFile, String xpath)
    {
        SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder();
        try {
            Document build = builder.build(xmlFile);
            XPath filterXpression = XPath.newInstance(xpath);
            // String xpathCompiled = filterXpression.getXPath();
            List<Element> nodes = filterXpression.selectNodes(build);
            return nodes;
        } catch (JDOMException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();  
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();  
        }
        return null;
    }

but it returns Element not PsiElement, can I convert that Element into a PsiElement?

Thanks !

If you're working on a plugin, you'll need to add the XPathView plugin jar to the classpath of the IntelliJ IDEA SDK.

DOM elements and PSI elements are two completely different representations of an XML document; there is no way to convert between them.