csharp-in-10-minutes.md

Tutorial: C# in 10 Minutes

Install the .NET Client

ArangoDB .NET client could be installed from Nuget. It supports variants of runtimes including .NET 4.5, .NET Core 1.0, Mono/Xamarin, UAP 10.0, WPA 8.1, WIN 8 ... .

So let's Install the latest version of the client by:

Install-Package ArangoDB.Client

Create a Database Setting

First of all we need to tell the client how to connect to ArangoDB server. We do this by creating a new database setting using ChangeSetting static method:

ArangoDatabase.ChangeSetting(s =>
{
    s.Database = "TutorialDotNet";
    s.Url = "http://localhost:8529";

    // you can set other settings if you need
    s.Credential = new NetworkCredential("root", "123456");
    s.SystemDatabaseCredential = new NetworkCredential("root", "123456");
});

By this you will create(or change if exists) a database setting named default. If you need to connect to multiple databases you can create other settings by specifying an identifier:

ArangoDatabase.ChangeSetting("setting-identifier", s => {});

Work with Database

Creating a document, executing a query and all other operations against ArangoDB server are accessible through ArangoDatabase object.

Let's create an ArangoDatabase object and tell it to use the default setting that we created before. To do this we can use CreateWithSetting static method:

using (var db = ArangoDatabase.CreateWithSetting())
{
}

If we create other settings, we can use them by specify the setting identifier:

using (var db = ArangoDatabase.CreateWithSetting("setting-identifier"))
{
}

Create a Database

Let's start by creating a new database:

db.CreateDatabase("TutorialDotNet");

You can now get information about the new created database:

var currentDatabaseInfo = db.CurrentDatabaseInformation();

// path of the created database
Console.WriteLine(currentDatabaseInfo.Path);

Create a collection

Collections in ArangoDB are similar to Tables in a relational databases like Microsoft SQL Server.

Let's create a collection named Person in our database.

db.CreateCollection("Person");

ArangoDB has another type of collections called Edge collections. By creating edge collection we can use graph functionality that ArangoDB provides. To create edge collection:

db.CreateCollection("Friend", type: CollectionType.Edge);

Create a document

Now that we created our collection we can insert documents in it.

First Let's define a class Named Person to use it for declare our documents:

public class Person
{
    [DocumentProperty(Identifier = IdentifierType.Key)]
    public string Key { get; set; }

    public string Fullname { get; set; }

    public int Age { get; set; }
}

Then to insert new document:

var person = new Person
{
    Fullname = "raoof hojat",
    Age = 28
};

db.Insert<Person>(person);

// this will print the new inserted document key
Console.WriteLine(person.Key);

Note that when you use db.Insert<T>, collection name will be resolved from type of T which in this case is Person collection. you can read about naming convetions and how types are resolved later in this tutorial.

You can always use strings instead of types for resolving collection names:

db.Collection("Person").Insert(new Person
{
    Fullname = "raoof hojat",
    Age = 28
});

Update a document

We inserted a document, Let's update a member of it.

ArangoDB .NET client can track changes of your documents. So to update the document that we insert before we can apply changes and pass it to Update method:

person.Age = 35;

// partially updates person document, only `Age` attribute will be updated
db.Update<Person>(person);

Note that db.Update method can update inserted/loaded documents like above. If you want to update a document without loading it you should use db.UpdateById instead:

db.UpdateById<Person>("document-key", new { Age = 40 });

Read a document

Read a document can be done by:

var loadedPeson = db.Document<Person>("document-key");

Note that if document does not exists db.Document will return null.

Query database by LINQ

ArangoDB .NET client also supports LINQ queries for load/update/insert/remove documents.

Let's retrieve our inserted document by LINQ:

var result = db.Query<Person>()
    .Where(p => p.Age == 35)
    .Select(p => p.Fullname)
    .ToList();