Hi Enea,

WRITEBACK still applies only to those documents who are read from
disk. As calling db:export is pretty slow, I would currently recommend
you to define a convenience XQuery function that writes files on disk
before updating the database.

Hope this helps,
Christian

On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 10:19 AM, Enea Parimbelli
<enea.parimbelli@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear BaseX folks,
> I'm having trouble understanding the subtleties of the WRITEBACK option.
> I found this issue report that seems to describe my case as well but it
> refers to a rather old baseX version.
> https://github.com/BaseXdb/basex/issues/848
>
> As I understand it the WRITEBACK option will only work for files directly
> read from disk and not for those that have been added to a database at time
> of creation. I have created my database with a input path that already held
> all the xmls I needed to import:
> Resource Properties
>  Input Path: /home/enea/tmp/AF PHR extraction ALL DATA
>  Input Size: 74 MB
>  Timestamp: 2016-12-19T08:45:34.841Z
>  Encoding: UTF-8
>  CHOP: true
>
>
> Does the above still apply to baseX 8.2.3? If the issue has been addressed
> can you describe how the current implementation works?
> Is the only workaround to this explicitly calling EXPORT after all the
> update/insertion/deletion queries to see the modifications reflected in the
> original files on disk?
>
> Thanks for your help,
> Enea
>
> --
> Enea Parimbelli, Ph.D.
> Post-doc research fellow | Biomedical informatics lab "Mario Stefanelli"
>
> Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering
>
> University of Pavia
> Via Ferrata 5, 27100, Pavia (Italy)