August 2014 - BaseX-Talk - mailman.uni-konstanz.de

What is the best way to implement an async REST method?
by Marc van Grootel 16 Dec '14

16 Dec '14

How would you implement an async REST pattern? I don't remember having seen anything that makes me do this using plain XQuery. Does this mean the only way to tackle this would be via Java and events maybe? I would post to a URL, this URL would accept the post and return a temporary URL where I can check the status of my request, then once it's ready this temp URL will redirect me to the location of the real resource. That's the gist of the async REST pattern that I would like to implement. What would be the best approach to experiment with this? --Marc

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REST queries: "Read permissions needed"
by Jérôme Chauveau 25 Nov '14

25 Nov '14

Hi, i am using BaseX79 as a webapp - embedded in a tomcat7 server. I am working on a php application which runs REST xqueries to my BaseX server. I created a "mydb" database and a user "myuser". Then i granted READ permissions for "myuser". > *GRANT read TO myuser* > *GRAND read TO myuser ON mydb* > *show users* Username Read Write Create Admin ------------------------------------ admin X X X X myuser X > *show users on mydb* Username Read Write --------------------- myuser X All my REST xqueries returns a "READ permission needed." message with the user "myuser" when its works properly with the admin user account. Moreover, REST xqueries via a web browser (logged as 'myuser') works properly too. Did i miss something? Thank's for help. Jérôme. -- Jérôme Chauveau - SAIC-CERTIC - Campus 4 Université de Caen Basse-Normandie

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Full text score with or
by Andy Bunce 23 Nov '14

23 Nov '14

Hi, I want to score searches with multiple conditions e.g. let $data:=( <r><a>red apple</a></r>, <r><a>blue lagoon</a></r>, <r><b>fish and chips</b></r>) for $hit score $s in $data[ a contains text("red") or b contains text("fish")] return $s In 7.8.2 it always returns scores of zero. In version 7.6 it returns numbers like 0.6201145069582775 0.4528324252639413 Is this bug? Regards /Andy

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stream binary responses from http:module
by Johan Mörén 10 Nov '14

10 Nov '14

Hi I have built a small client in XQuery that fetches zip files from another remote service using the http-module and stores them on disk with the help of the file-module. Some of the returned zip files are really large and BaseX seems to need to materialize the files in memory before writing them to disk resulting in out of memory errors for some files. Is there some way read the response in a more streamable fashion when using the http-module? I tried using the fetch:binary function successfully but i really need the more extended functionality of the http-module. #results in out of memory if the zip file is too large file:write-binary("file.zip", http:sendrequest(...)[2]) #works all the time. file:write-binary("file.zip", fetch:binary(...)) Regards, Johan

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Mac OS X, key bindings, 8.0 betas
by James Ball 23 Sep '14

23 Sep '14

Hello, Is anyone else running the BaseX 8.0 betas on Mac OS X? If so has anyone else found that the key bindings in the GUI: <command> + <return> for Run query and, <command> + <shift> + <return> for Run tests, are not working? The others I’ve tried are ok. I don’t know if this is a quirk of my system or an issue I should log. Many thanks, James

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db documents metadata
by Marc van Grootel 12 Sep '14

12 Sep '14

Hi, I was looking through the feature list in the issue tracker to see what's in the pipeline. I suddenly remembered a feature from an xml database I used a couple of years ago called Qizx. This had a very neat feature where every database document and collection could have a special map with metadata properties. These do not affect the XML content in any way but they can be accessed via special API calls or Qizx specific extension module. A better explanation of this feature can be read in the Qizx manual (for example here http://kiwi.emse.fr/DN/qizx-manual.pdf on page 18 and 57). I have used such metadata properties on nodes to implement syncing XML documents in a SCM (Subversion). I stored revision id's and other SCM control data in those properties. Authors would work in Subversion and certain directories where kept synced to a Qizx database so we could easily create PDF publications of the latest XML with zero impact on the XML itself. Maybe BaseX already uses something like that under the hood, I don't know. If so extending it or opening it for use would be useful I think, and generally cool :-) -- --Marc

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basex 7.9 - red hat package?
by Olivier JEULIN 10 Sep '14

10 Sep '14

Hello, when do you plan to release a package for RedHat? The repository has only v7.8. FYI, 7.9 solves a bug that we just found in 7.8, so, good work! :-)

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BaseX v7.9 Tomcat Issues
by Bridger Dyson-Smith 02 Sep '14

02 Sep '14

Hi all, I'm exploring webapps and BaseX using Tomcat 7.0.53 and I'm running into an odd error, or set of errors, with v7.9. For example, visiting localhost:8080/BaseX79 the page isn't styled [1] and trying the test in Example 2 fails [2]. This isn't a huge deal, as I also have v7.8.2 which works fine. For my current level of tinkering it is more than sufficient. However, I was wondering if there was something I needed to change in v7.9. In both versions I simply downloaded the .war and dropped it into my $tomcat/webapps directory. Best, Bridger [1] [2]

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A good way to backup/restore database to/from an external file
by Ioan Fericel 02 Sep '14

02 Sep '14

Hi all, I would ask you to give me an opinion on what would be the simplest solution, when pressing a button in a web page that triggers the function "db:create-backup" of BaseX, to have the possibility of saving the resulting file in a location chosen by the user, including the name generated from the concatenation of timestamp. Possibly with the option to not be saved in the default location. And also the reverse way: restore a database from a backup file (zip), showing the path to it, with the file upload. Thanks for any ideas, Ioan

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Is there an XML based collaborative curation environment?
by Martin Mueller 29 Aug '14

29 Aug '14

I have sent this post simultaneously to the eXist, baseX, and TEI lists in the hope that I will get some useful advice on how to cobble together an XML-based collaborative curation platform. If there is something "out there" that meets some of my requirements I would love to hear about it. Phil Burns, Craig Berry, and I have been engaged in an informal project that I call Shakespeare His Contemporaries (SHC). The source texts for SHC are the TCP transcriptions, transformed into TEI P5 with Abbot and linguistically with MorphAdorner. To goal is to produce "good enough" texts (in original and standardized spellings) through collaborative curation, enlisting the help of educated amateurs as well as professional scholars. A group of Northwestern undergraduate on summer internships fixed about 70% of some 45,000 known errors in almost 500 Early Modern non-Shakespearean plays and demonstrated that you don't need to have a Ph.D. to make valuable contributions to scholarship. My curation framework has been a mixture of XML and SQL. MorphAdorner can spit out its data as a TEI file or in a tabular format.(http://morphadorner.northwestern.edu). The latter is easily turned into a MySQL database. AnnoLex, our curation tool (http://annolex.at.northwestern.edu) was built by Craig Berry. It is a Django web site that talks to an underlying MySQL database and lets registered users make emendations that are kept in a separate table for subsequent review and integration into the XML files. MorphAdorner includes scripts for updating XML files in the light of approved emendations. It also keeps track of changes made. This system works well in environments where curators operate in a controlled and work-like environment, cycling through textual phenomena selected by some criteria likely to return incomplete or incorrect text. It works well because most of the errors in the TCP transcriptions are of a very simple kind that lends itself to an 'atomic' word by word treatment.The combination of Django and a relational database makes it very easy to keep track of who did what where and when, and who approved or rejected an emendation. These are non-trivial virtues, and there are many TCP errors that can be fixed by this method before you run up against its limits. On the other hand, this method does not support what I call "curation en passant," readers reading "with a pencil" or its digital equivalent, stopping here or there to question a word or passages and offering a diagnosis or emendation as a marginal gloss. I would like to have an curation environment that looks like a page that supports reading of the common garden variety but through a click on a word shows a pop-up window that lists the properties of a token and offers a template for structured and free-form annotation. The current model also fails when it comes to making changes in the XML structure. In terms of the immediate needs of a project that focus on EEBO-TCP drama texts, the most common errors involve just the correction of a tag name: turning <stage> into <l> or the other way round. There are ways in which these errors could be corrected by extending AnnoLex, but it would be clumsy, and it would not support more substantial changes in the XML structure. So you want a curation environment that lets you manipulate the XML structure as well as the words inside elements. For instance, half the plays in the EEBO-TCP collections are not divided into acts and scenes because such a division is lacking in the printed source. Adding scene divisions (with an appropriate notation that they are supplied by an editor) is an important step towards making the texts more "machine actionable," and a proper digital corpus should be both human readable and machine actionable. The best curation environment would be XML based, but I wonder about scale. As I understand it, 'scale' in an XML application is a function of the number of documents, their size, and the complexity of encoding. The SHC corpus has about 500 documents and could grow to 1,000 if one interpreted "contemporaries" more generously or decided to include Shakespeare's Restoration heirs. Most plays fall in a range between 15,000 and 25,000 words. In a linguistically annotated corpus the typical leaf node is a <w> or <pc> element with a set of attributes, such as <w xml:id="A04632_0500750" lemma ="Cleopatra", ana="#npg1">Cleopatraes</w> The modal XPath of such a leaf node goes like TEI/text/body/div@act/div@scene/sp/l/w There are about 12 million Xpaths in the SHC corpus, and it is important for readers to be able to move quickly from one to the other within and across plays so as to support what I call "cascading curation," where the diagnosis of an error in one play leads to the question whether there are similar errors elsewhere. So much for scale, and I don't know whether it is a big problem, a small problem, or no longer a problem at all. If you want to extend a curation model from 500 plays to the eventually 70,000 texts in the EEBO TCP corpus there might be a scale problem. On the other hand, if you think of collaborative curation in a humanities environment and you think of scholarly data communities that organize themselves around some body of texts, it may be that something like 1,000 texts or 50 millon words words is a good enough upper limit: breaking down the big city of a large corpus into "corpus villages" (perhaps with some overlap) may be technically and socially preferable. I don't have a very clear idea how a permissions regime would work in an XML environment. It is clear to me that a change of any kind should take the form of an annotation and that the integration of such an annotation into the source text would be the work of an editor with special privileges. There needs to be a clear trail of the 'who, what, when, and where' of any textual change, and as much a possible of this detail should be logged automatically. The scholarly communities I'm familiar with are unlikely to accept texts as curated unless there are familiar seals of good housekeeping that they recognize as the equivalent of the assurances that come with a reputable printed text. I could go on in considerable detail about the needs of our project (and similar ones), but I hope I have outlined enough of the requirements in sufficient detail. Thanks in advance for any advice Martin Mueller Professor emeritus of English and Classics Northwestern University

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