Collection name / ID generator

[Mangatt]

I think it would be useful to officially expose collection name and id generator on collection object:

const collection = db.collection("collection");
console.log(collection.name); // collection

This is right now undocumented feature and thus not realiable for use in production. It is useful for generating ID from _key:

const id = collection.name + '/' + _key

Maybe it would be worth to even include specialized method for this:

const id = collection.getID("documentID")
console.log(id); // collection/documentID

[pluma]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "not reliable for use in production"? Do you mean that the name property isn't mentioned in the arangojs documentation? If so, that's an oversight.

[Mangatt]

Yes, that's what I ment. Thanks

[nathanvogel]

I also lost a bit of time because handling IDs in AQL string templates isn't super well documented (when to put quotes for example) and I found myself having to write this for a graph traversal:

CONCAT(${entColl.name()}, '/', ${req.pathParams.entity1})

which feels a bit clunky (but only because ArangoDB is so sleek otherwise).
I guess I could also do the concatenation outside the AQL query.

[Simran-B]

Related: arangodb/arangodb#8749

[pluma]

ArangoDB 3.5 will add a method documentId(documentKey: string): string to collection objects which will behave like the getID method you envisioned. We'll add a similar method in arangojs in an upcoming release.

[xgenvn]

@pluma quick question related to id/key:
Should I use _id (<collection_name>/key) or _key for queries? Which one is preferable?

[pluma]

@xgenvn I'm not sure what you mean or what that question has to do with the issue you're replying to. Can you clarify?

[xgenvn]

@xgenvn I'm not sure what you mean or what that question has to do with the issue you're replying to. Can you clarify?

I'm trying to use _id or _key for linking between some documents under different collections, similar to foreign keys in SQL. Even though the join query can be anything but I want to know the best practice.
Eg:

articles: {
  comments: [
    //can be 'comments/123'
   //or just '123'
  ]
}

Also, when I write the api, it's something similar to getById, but the actual logic checking for the _key (similar to orangojs, checking for both case).

[Simran-B]

You need to use document IDs if you wants to reference documents that reside in different collections. If they are all in one, then the key would be sufficient, but you need to remember which collection they reside in. Using IDs makes it more self-contained, but you shouldn't rename the collections (if you have to, then make sure to update the document references).