Introduction

All XML data stored in XBird is organized into a hierarchy of collections.

A collection is exactly what its name suggests: it contains any number of XML documents, and can in addition contain its own child collections, thus providing a hierarchy. A collection is directly mapped into a directory of the underlying file system.

The "root" collection is also called the Database. It is special in that:

• It has no parent as the name tells.
• The database root directory is specified through xbird.database.datadir property in xbird.properties. By the default, `java.io.tmpdir'/xbird is used for the directory.

Configuring a Database

The xbird.database.datadir property can be overrided by putting your modified xbird.properties file on the directory where System.getProperty("user.home") directs.

// You can simply ask the system for the “java.io.tmpdir” and "user.home" properties as following:
String tmpDir = System.getProperty("java.io.tmpdir");
String userHome = System.getProperty("user.home");
System.out.println("java.io.tmpdir: [" + tmpDir + "], user.home: [" + userHome + "]");

Importing Documents

Importing documents by command line

Importing XML documents into database is easily accomplished by command line scripts: command.sh for Unix and command.bat for Windows.

These scripts are included in xbird-xx-src.zip. We assume the decompressed directory as $XBIRD_HOME in this document.

The usage of these scripts is quite simple.

[Unix]
# import an XML document into "/test1" collection.
 $ ./command.sh -col test1 import document /pathto/some.xml
# import XML documents in /pathto/folder into the root (i.e., "/") collection.
 $ ./command.sh import document /pathto/folder
# import XML documents *recursively* in the sub-directories of /pathto/folder into the root collection.
 $ ./command.sh import document /pathto/folder recursive

[Windows]
# import an XML document into "/test1" collection.
 $ command.bat -col test1 import document C:\pathto\some.xml

The above command creates the following files:

xbird.database.datadir              # root collection 
└─test1                                # '/test1' collection
        some.xml.dtms                  # some.xml document
        test1.dtmp                       # properties of collection
        test1.qnames                   # manages qnames of the documents in 'test1' collection
        test1.strc                        # manages texts (textchunks) of the documents in 'test1' collection
        test1.strc.cache              # cache file for text chunks
        test1.strc.di_h                 # index of the string chunks

Deleting documents or collections

Just delete directories or some.xml.* files in the database directory :-)

Accessing to documents in collection

The fn:collection function returns a sequence of documents in the specified collection.

It takes the syntax: fn:collection($arg as xs:string?) as node()*

# To retrieve the "some.xml" document in "test1" collection.
fn:collection("/test1/some.xml")

# To retrieve all documents in "test1" collection.
fn:collection("/test1")

You can pass a regex expression in Java's regex syntax to $arg.

# To retrieve every documents which name start with a prefix 's' and end with '.xml' in the collection 'test1'. 
fn:collection("/test1/s.*.xml")