running server commands from a script?

From time to time, I find myself wanting to run BaseX server commands from a shell script. For example, if I have two or three documents I'd like to add to a database, it's easy enough to do so from the GUI interface, or from the interactive server prompt. But if it's five or ten documents (and even more so if it's a few hundred or a few thousand documents), entering the commands interactively can become tedious and error prone. When the files are available on the local file system, I can use wildcards and I can add a directory at a time. But when the files are on a remote server and identified by URI instead of file name, I guess that won't work. What I think I'm looking for is the ability to specify a sequence of BaseX server commands and have it run that sequence of commands -- or some other way of being able to specify a list of filenames or URIs and have them all added to a given database. For example CREATE DATABASE demo OPEN demo ADD http://example.com/docs/a.xml ADD http://example.com/docs/b.xml ADD http://example.com/docs/c.xml ADD http://example.com/docs/d.xml ADD http://example.com/docs/e.xml ... ADD http://example.com/docs/z.xml RENAME http://example.com/docs/ / # I'd use ADD to a.xml http://example.com/docs/a.xml, but # that doesn't seem to have the effect I expect. But # RENAME works for what I need There is certainly a lot of BaseX documentation I have not read, but I have not found any mention of this kind of thing. Have I overlooked it? One technique that I guess would work would be to exploit the new REST interface (very nice, by the way!) and write a bash script that went something like this:

  curl http://localhost:8984/rest?command=CREATE+DATABASE+demo

  curl http://localhost:8984/rest/demo?command=ADD+http://example.com/docs/a.xml
  curl http://localhost:8984/rest/demo?command=ADD+http://example.com/docs/b.xml
  curl http://localhost:8984/rest/demo?command=ADD+http://example.com/docs/c.xml
  curl http://localhost:8984/rest/demo?command=ADD+http://example.com/docs/d.xml
  curl http://localhost:8984/rest/demo?command=ADD+http://example.com/docs/e.xml
  ...
  curl http://localhost:8984/rest/demo?command=ADD+http://example.com/docs/z.xml

  curl http://localhost:8984/rest/demo?command=RENAME+http://example.com/docs/+/

or rather

  CURL="curl --user X:secretpasswd"
  $CURL http://localhost:8984/rest?command=CREATE+DATABASE+demo
  etc.

But if there is s nicer way to handle this case, I'd be glad to learn about it. Perhaps this is when I should buckle down and learn how to do this kind of thing with XQuery Update? Thanks! Michael Sperberg-McQueen

Here are two approaches that might do what you need: a) you can separate multiple commands by semi-colons. an example: basex -c "create db test <a/>; info db; drop db test" b) commands can also be copied to an extra file and then redirected to basex: basex < basex-commands.txt

This should work as well (at least with the latest version I'm having here): basex -c "create db db; add to 123.xml http://files.basex.org/BaseXPADFile.xml; list db" Input Path Type Content-Type Size --------------------------------------- 123.xml xml application/xml 245 ..what happens in your case?

;) Unfortunately, that's not possible with XQuery Update anyway, as there's no way to add new documents to a collection (but for some reason it's actually legal to add several root elements to a document node). As a matter of fact, we are internally using exactly the same update operations for adding documents to a database, which can be called from the database commands and our XQuery database module [1]. This is a small example for adding 10,000 dummy documents to a database 'DB':

  for $i in 1 to 10000
  let $doc := document { <xml>{ $i }</xml> }
  return db:add('DB', $doc, concat($i, '.xml'))

Feel free to ask for more, Christian [1] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Database_Module