Hey Artc, I was looking to solve the same problem. I created a set of data component classes (charts and grids) have properties for the datasource URL and xpath. My first attempt was using the descendants method, but it was limited to just returning the repeating nodes from any parent nodes. I want to be able to use any valid xpath expression to evaluate the xml from the datasource which will support specific node locations and also support filtering data.
The only way I could make this work is using an external 3rd party library. I am using http://code.google.com/p/xpath-as3. It works but is noticeably slow on datasets exceeding 1000 rows. This really should be included in the Actionscript core XML classes. I have worked with Java XML libraries such as Axiom and JDOM which support xpath expression evaluation directly. /Paul
