Extracting Static Lists from Site Studio Datafile

I had a customer that needed to display the information of a static lists in the page template of the section rather than the region template.
Getting the contents of a static lists in the region template is a pretty straight forward exercise.

<!--$wcmListStart("myStaticList")-->
<!--$wcmListIndex = 0-->
<!--$wcmListNumRows = wcmListRowCount()-->
<table><!--$loopwhile wcmListIndex < wcmListNumRows-->
<tr>
<td><!--$wcmListElement("Heading_Element", wcmListIndex)--></td>
<td><!--$wcmListElement("Description_Element", wcmListIndex)--></td>
</tr>
<!--$wcmListIndex = wcmListIndex + 1-->
<!--$endloop--></table>
<!--$wcmListEnd("myStaticList")-->

However I couldn't find any useful information frrom Oracle about doing this from out-side the region context.

The main function to do extract the content of a datafile is ssIncludeXml you need to know the dDocName of the datafile you want to use, in my case, it was the same datafile of the repleasable region in the template so I used the idoc function ssDocName but you can use any content ID of a datafile in your system.

The second parameter is the XPATH expression to point to the appropiate place in the XML file. There are several examples out there of how to do this for common elements.

for example if I have a wysiwyg element named body the way to include it anywhere in my site (i.e. fragments, sub-templates, page templates) will be:

ssIncludeXml(dDocName, "wcm:root/wcm:element[@name='Element Name']/text()")
ssIncludeXml("DATAFILE123", "wcm:root/wcm:element[@name='BODY_WYSIWYG']/text()")

So to do the same with a static list element is just a matter of getting the appropiate XPATH.

ssIncludeXml(dDocName,"wcm:root/wcm:list[@name='Name of lists']/wcm:row[row number]/wcm:element[@name='Name of lists element']
For example:
ssIncludeXml("DATAFILE123","wcm:root/wcm:list[@name='myStaticList']/wcm:row[1]/wcm:element[@name='Heading_Element']

here is an example for the same datafile as the first example..(a datafile with a static lists element containing two columns):

<!--$wcmListNumRows = 0-->
<!--Get the number of records in the lists-->
<!--$strNumRecords=ssGetXmlNodeCount(ssDocName, "wcm:root/wcm:list[@name='RelatedInformationWidgetLinks']/wcm:row")-->
<!--$wcmListNumRows=toInteger(strTrimWs(strNumRecords))-->
<!--$nPos=1-->
<!-- Only display this block if there are items in the lists -->
<!--if wcmListNumRows gt 0-->
<table>
<!--$loopwhile nPos <= wcmListNumRows-->
<td><!--$ssIncludeXml(ssDocName,"wcm:root/wcm:list[@name='myStaticList']/wcm:row["&nPos&"]/wcm:element[@name='Heading_Element']--></td>
<td><!--$ssIncludeXml(ssDocName,"wcm:root/wcm:list[@name='myStaticList']/wcm:row["&nPos&"]/wcm:element[@name='Description_Element']--></td>
</tr>
<!--$nPos=nPos+1-->
<!--$endloop-->
</table>