Thanks for your discussion. I’ll give some comments to…
1. Returned paths of file:descendants and file:children
The paths returned by these functions start with the directory
argument specified by the user. The argument may point to a relative
or absolute path. Code can often be simplified by replacing file:list
with file:children or file:descendants:
let $root := 'a/b/c/'
for $path in file:list($root)
return file:read-text($root || $path)
for $path in file:children('a/b/c')
return file:read-text($path)
I have revised the wording in the documentation and added some
examples; I hope it’s better understandable now what the functions are
supposed to do.
2. The Base vs. Current Working Directory
The concept of the »current working directory« goes back to the early
times of the specification of the File Module (which was defined
together with guys from Zorba/28msec). There were various reasons why
we did not resort to the base URI as default location:
• The static base URI may be empty, and it might point to a non-local resource
• If a function of the File Module is located in a library module, we
regarded the behavior as counterintuitive if a file function used this
module’s URI to resolve local files.
>From today’s perspective, I believe it would have been easier to get
rid of the »current working directory« and to exclusively work with
the static base URI. In particular, it would have been easier to
exchange functions from the File Module and other functions.
In more complex code, it’s usually a good choice to rewrite relative
input paths to absolute native paths at the very beginning. The
file:path-to-native can be used for that if the addressed path exists.
In addition to file:resolve-path, it’s expected to resolve symbolic
links and return filenames in their actual case on Windows systems
(e.g., “C:\users\” might be rewritten to “C:\Users\”). We didn’t
specify the exact behavior in the spec, as it may depend on the
operating system. For example, as UNIX-based system works
case-sensitive, so there may be two files “a” and “A” in the same
directory. And so on.
To answer Hans-Jürgen’s question,
> (3) Apparent rule: when called in the GUI, it is - I don't know.
The static base URI is set to a non-existing resource (named "file")
in the directory in which an editor file was stored most recently. In
earlier versions of BaseX, it was undefined as long as the edited file
was not stored. As you can guess, it’s not recommendable to use
file:base-dir as long as you don’t know where your query will be
stored.
