3.2 The Administrative GUI

The Administrative GUI uses the built-in XRPC HTTP server (see XRPC Server) to present a web-based database administration GUI. In fact, the GUI is a "glueless" pure-HTML application that uses the JavaScript XRPC API to interact with MonetDB/XQuery without any server-side code. As such, it is also a demonstration of its Javascript API for XRPC (see Using XRPC from JavaScript).

If you have MonetDB/XQuery running on your local machine, just point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:50001/admin. If your Mserver runs on a different <machine>, then point it to http://<machine>:50001/admin.

However, the Administrative GUI usually only allows clients from the local machine (for security reasons). For it to work from another machine, you have to add the name of that machine in to the semicolon list value of the xrpc_admin variable in the MonetDB.conf file (see MonetDB.conf). Giving xrpc_admin the value of the empty string, has the special meaning that you can connect from anywhere.

You can look at the Tutorial Page for a walkthrough.

The Administrative GUI provides the following functionality:

• List Collections: list all document collections, even those for which shredding is in progress. By clicking on a collection, you can see a list of all documents it contains.
• List All Documents: list all documents in the entire database. You can click "view" to see the entire XML file in your web browser (warning: web browsers typically can only handle a few MB of XML documents; do not try this with large XML files!!).
• Add Document: add a document (to an XML collection). There is a dialog window for selecting an XML file on the hard drive on the machine where your browser runs, but this route only works if you run the Mserver on the same machine as your browser. Otherwise you have to type a filepath that is valid on the Mserver machine (or a URL) to identify the document that you want to add.

  If you want to add many documents, we refer to the Performance Tips (see Bulk Loading a Collection).

• View Database Statistics displays statistics on the current size of the XQuery log (see XQuery Updates), the size of the XML Document Cache (see XML Document Cache) and current memory usage.
• View DB Environment shows the MonetDB.conf file (see MonetDB.conf, which is used to set all important configuration defaults for MonetDB/XQuery.
• Backup/Restore Database allows to perform Backup/Restore of the entire database system (see Backup/Restore).
• XRPC Test Page provides a click-able demo where you can see our XRPC at (see XRPC Extension).