Flux supports copying documents and their associated metadata from one database to another.

Table of contents

Usage

Similar to the commands for exporting documents, the copy command requires that you specify the documents you wish to copy, along with connection information for the MarkLogic database you wish to read from.

The following options control which documents are read from MarkLogic:

Option Description
--collections Comma-delimited sequence of collection names.
--directory A database directory for constraining on URIs.
--options Name of a REST API search options document; typically used with a string query.
--query A structured, serialized CTS, or combined query expressed as JSON or XML.
--string-query A string query utilizing MarkLogic’s search grammar.
--uris Newline-delimited sequence of document URIs to retrieve.

You must specify at least one of --collections, --directory, --query, --string-query, or --uris. You may specify any combination of those options as well, with the exception that --query will be ignored if --uris is specified.

If you use --query to select documents, please see the guide on exporting documents for more information and examples of the types of values you can provide to --query.

The copy command then requires that you specify connection information for the output database that the documents will be copied into. Each of the connection options can be used for this output database, but with output as a prefix so that they are distinguished from the connections used for the source database. For example, --output-connection-string is used to specify a connection string for the output database. If you are copying the documents to the same database that they were read from, you can omit output connection options.

The following shows an example of copying documents from a collection to a different database in the same MarkLogic cluster:

  • ./bin/flux copy \
  --connection-string "flux-example-user:password@localhost:8004" \
  --collections "example" \
  --output-connection-string "flux-example-user:password@localhost:8004" \
  --output-database "target-database"

  • bin\flux copy ^
  --connection-string "flux-example-user:password@localhost:8004" ^
  --collections "example" ^
  --output-connection-string "flux-example-user:password@localhost:8004" ^
  --output-database "target-database"

Controlling what metadata is read

The --categories option controls what metadata is read from the source database. The option defaults to a value of content,metadata, resulting in the document content and all metadata being read for each matching URI. In addition to content and metadata, valid choices include collections, permissions, quality, properties, and metadatavalues. Choices should be concatenated together into a comma-delimited string. For example, the following will only read documents and their collections and permissions:

--categories content,collections,permissions

Controlling how documents are written

The copy command supports many of the same options as the import commands for writing documents. Similar to the output connection options, each option for controlling how documents are written is prefixed with output. For example, to specify collections for the documents, --output-collections is used instead of --collections.