MappingIterator merges a sequence of sequences into a single flat sequence. It takes as inputs an iteration, and a mapping function to be applied to each Item returned by that iteration. The mapping function itself returns another iteration. The result is an iteration of the concatenation of all the iterations returned by the mapping function.
This is a powerful class. It is used, with different mapping functions, in a great variety of ways. It underpins the way that "for" expressions and path expressions are evaluated, as well as sequence expressions. It is also used in the implementation of the document(), key(), and id() functions.