BaseX's documentation and the following (an excerpt from an email on the mailing list[1]) says this on the fn:collection function:

fn:collection() either returns documents of a database or of the specified location

From this it seems that it can return the documents of a specified location (without ever creating a database), however the following query:

collection("<xml-dir>")

reports the following error (using both the GUI and the command-line):

[FODC0004] File or directory "File or directory "<basex>" not found." not found.

(Using Windows 7) I passed several kind of path to the collection function ("c:/xml-dir", "file:///c:/xml-dir", ...), but none of them works. Also, the actual path of "<basex>" in the error depends on whether I start the GUI (<basex>/BaseX.jar) or the command-line (<basex>/bin/basex.bat); the respective paths in these two cases are "<basex>" and "<basex>/bin".

(Issuing something like doc("<xml-dir>/<xml-file>") works.)

Is this the expected behavior?

If yes, is that means that using BaseX one can only query multiple XML files after creating a database for them?
If not, ... is this a bug? (I highly doubt.)

(On a side note: something like DataDirect - supposedly - can do[2] would be awesome in BaseX. Was this ever considered to include in BaseX?)

My reason for doing a query like this is: I've just tried to ran it and it didn't work, so I'm here.

Thanks!

Regards,
Kohányi Róbert

[1]: https://mailman.uni-konstanz.de/pipermail/basex-talk/2011-November/002213.html
[2]: http://www.xquery.com/tips_and_tricks/querying_multiple_documents.html