Xapian Database won't write - how to initialize

[Taylor Gronka]

I want to use xapian as a full text search engine. However, when I initialize it with the following method, I see no errors, but nothing writes to the database. If I copy all of the code into  view, it works. However, this is not an option since I can only use a single connection for writing to the database, so it needs to be shared amongst all threads. I would like to initialize it in __init__.py, but I must be doing something wrong.

I added this code to models.py:

import xapian

class XapianDB(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.indexer = xapian.TermGenerator()
        stemmer = xapian.Stem("english")
        self.indexer.set_stemmer(stemmer)

    def connect(self, xapdb_path):
        self.xapdb = xapian.WritableDatabase(xapdb_path, xapian.DB_CREATE_OR_OPEN)

    def add_startup(self, startup):
        doc = xapian.Document()
        self.indexer.set_document(doc)

        self.indexer.index_text(startup.name, 1, 'S')
        self.indexer.index_text(startup.headquarters, 1, 'XH')

        self.indexer.index_text(startup.name)
        self.indexer.increase_termpos()
        self.indexer.index_text(startup.headquarters)

        doc.set_data("look at all of this data")

        idterm = "Q" + str(startup.id)
        doc.add_boolean_term(idterm)
        self.xapdb.replace_document(idterm, doc)

xapp = XapianDB()

Then in __init__.py I added

from .models import xapp

def main(global_config, **settings):
    #... other code
    xapp.connect("/path/to/xapiandb")

And I make a silly view:

from .models import xapp

class ViewFrontpage(ViewWarlock):
    def __init__(self, context, request):
        ViewWarlock.__init__(self, context, request)

    @view_config(route_name='test3', renderer='templates/test2.jinja2')
    def test3(self):
        startup.name = "a name"
        startup.long_info = "we will always be there doing the best that we can do for the people we care about"
        startup.id = 100
        startup.headquarters = "Gainesville, Georgia"
        xapp.add_startup(startup)

        return {'gibs': self.gibs,
                }