Importing Self-Contained JSON Documents

This import method allows uploading self-contained JSON documents. The documents must be uploaded in the body of the HTTP POST request. Each line of the body will be interpreted as one stand-alone document. Empty lines in the body are allowed but will be skipped. Using this format, the documents are imported line-wise.

Example input data: { “_key”: “key1”, … } { “_key”: “key2”, … } …

To use this method, the type query parameter should be set to documents.

It is also possible to upload self-contained JSON documents that are embedded into a JSON array. Each element from the array will be treated as a document and be imported.

Example input data for this case:

[
  { "_key": "key1", ... },
  { "_key": "key2", ... },
  ...
]

This format does not require each document to be on a separate line, and any whitespace in the JSON data is allowed. It can be used to import a JSON-formatted result array (e.g. from arangosh) back into ArangoDB. Using this format requires ArangoDB to parse the complete array and keep it in memory for the duration of the import. This might be more resource-intensive than the line-wise processing.

To use this method, the type query parameter should be set to array.

Setting the type query parameter to auto will make the server auto-detect whether the data are line-wise JSON documents (type = documents) or a JSON array (type = array).

Examples

curl --data-binary @- -X POST --dump - "http://localhost:8529/_api/import?type=documents&collection=test"
{ "name" : "test", "gender" : "male", "age" : 39 }
{ "type" : "bird", "name" : "robin" }

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Server: ArangoDB
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{"error":false,"created":2,"empty":0,"errors":0}

The server will respond with an HTTP 201 if everything went well. The number of documents imported will be returned in the created attribute of the response. If any documents were skipped or incorrectly formatted, this will be returned in the errors attribute. There will also be an attribute empty in the response, which will contain a value of 0.

If the details parameter was set to true in the request, the response will also contain an attribute details which is an array of details about errors that occurred on the server side during the import. This array might be empty if no errors occurred.