Hi Graydon,

I guess this question didn’t get any response so far:

> How does one go about binding a literal map to an external variable?  (I am going to want to do this in a script later; the GUI version is strictly for testing.)

External variable bindings via the GUI are limited to atomic items. If
you use Java for scripting, you could proceed as follows:

import org.basex.core.*;
import org.basex.query.*;
import org.basex.query.value.*;

public class BindMap {
  public static void main(String... whatever) throws Exception {
    Context ctx = new Context();
    String input = "map { 'structure': '/some/path/name' }";
    Value map = new QueryProcessor(input, ctx).value();

    String query = "declare variable $map external; $map";
    QueryProcessor qp = new QueryProcessor(query, ctx);
    System.out.println(qp.bind("map", map).value());
  }
}

Hope this helps,
Christian