MyCouch says hello to Cloudant

I just took MyCouch – the .Net client for CouchDb for a spin with Cloudant. My findings? It was super easy to get started with a multi tenant account at Cloudant. You could probably do it under 5 min. Let me take you through some easy steps and show you how-to do it.

Setting things up

First, I Just went over to Cloudant’s site and registered for an account and then created a database in the dashboard.

Second, in the dashboard, after creating the database, I generated an API-key for use with my test app.

Finally, I configured the API-key's permissions for the database.

Bam! That’s it. If you followed this, your all set and ready to go and now have a hosted NoSQL data storage solution available to you over HTTP.

Code away

Lets look at a quick sample of how to currently connect (simplified API is coming) to Cloudant and make use of the hosted database. The API-key created earlier is used using basic authentication over https.

The first thing you need to do, is to install the NuGet package:

PM> install-package mycouch

The next step is to get connected (read more in the docs):

//If you have chars not allowed in the URL
//wrap in Uri.EscapeUriString, e.g.
//Uri.EscapeDataString("p@ssword")
var credentials = string.Format("{0}:{1}",
  "theApiKey",
  "thePassword");

var url = string.Format(
  "https://{0}@useraccount.cloudant.com/dbname/",
  credentials);```

There are some alternative ways, like a `MyCouchUriBuilder` that you can [read about in the documentation](https://github.com/danielwertheim/MyCouch/wiki/documentation#get-connected).

Now, lets continue and connect and to a simple `POST` and `GET` using plain JSON.

```csharp
using (var client = new Client(url))
{
  var posted = client
    .Documents
    .PostAsync("{"msg": "MyCouch says hello to Cloudant!"}")
    .Result;

  var requested = client
    .Documents
    .GetAsync(posted.Id);

  Console.WriteLine(requested.Result.Content);
}

Outputs this to the console:

{
  "_id":"6b041a2c782a8254fb66646ecd264371",
  "_rev":"1-9091dd10ff42851a1a8ead3d1d3904ab",
  "msg":"MyCouch says hello to Cloudant!"
}

The same using entities, would look like this:

using (var client = new Client(url))
{
  var msg = new Message {
    Text = "MyCouch says hello to Cloudant!"
  };

  var posted = client
    .Entities
    .PostAsync(msg)
    .Result;

  //If successful, msg.MessageId and msg.MessageRev
  //now has correct values, and we can use those.
  var requested = client
    .Entities
    .GetAsync(msg.MessageId);

  Console.WriteLine(requested.Result.Entity.Text);
}

public class Message
{
  public string MessageId { get; set; }
  public string MessageRev { get; set; }
  public string Text { get; set; } 
}

Outputs this to the console:

"MyCouch says hello to Cloudant!"

By default, the Entities API comes with some conventions, like mapping the MessageId to _id. You can read more about it in the documentation.

Depending on what kind of request you perform the response will look a bit different, but there are some basic members providing you with generated _id & _rev etc. as well as basic HTTP response status etc, which looks something like this:

The future

I just released v0.11.0 of MyCouch, and are now planning on starting on some Cloudant specific features, distributed as a separate NuGet package. More on this will follow. But in short, I hope MyCouch can be made best buddy with Cloudant.

Cheers,

//Daniel