Tagesdecke - a thin CouchDB access library

This library is meant to be a thin access driver for CouchDB, easing most of the low-level HTTP handling via convenience functions.

The term 'tagesdecke' is the german term for coverlet meant to be lying on a couch.

The library is currently considered beta stage, minor API changes are going to occur. Relax ever so slightly.

Documentation can be found here.

Example usage in Node.js

First import all the dependencies for usage:

var request = require('request');
var tagesdecke = require('tagesdecke');
var Promise = require('bluebird');

Now configure the connection options. If you do not want to play on CouchDB in Admin-Party mode, provide a user and a passwd. Afterwards we can open the connection.

var options = {
  user: 'user',
  passwd: 'passwd',
  useCookie: true 
};

var connection = new Connection('http://localhost:5984', request, options);

Without Cookies, tagesdecke will use the basic HTTP Auth mode and send the user and password in each request. If you want to use cookies just set the useCookie flag and tagesdecke will try to keep the session alive, even when CouchDB deliberately kills it after a timeout. (See the CouchDB docs)

Theoretically you could now directly operate on the connection but you would have to specify the database in the url of the requests. Since we want a bit more convenience we will now care for opening a database. Since we want to ensure that the database exists we will make HTTP calls to the CouchDB host which will be represented by promises. Let's write a convenience function for lazily ensuer that the database is always open:

var dbname = 'dbname';
var database = null;

// Write a convenience method for cached access to a database.
function open () {
  if (database) {
    return new Promise(function (resolve, reject) {
      resolve(database);
    });
  } else {
    return connection.openDB(dbname).then(function (_database) {
      database = _database;
      return database;
    });
  }
}

Using that convenience method for opening the database we can now write a function for retrieving a document by ID from the database:

// Function for simple access to a document.
function getDocument(id) {
  return open().get(id).then(function (result) {
    return result.body;
  });
}

Et voila, now you can write your own abstraction layer on top of these two objects while still accessing all the gory details of the CouchDB HTTP Api if necessary. Enjoy.

Prakti/tagesdecke

Tagesdecke - a thin CouchDB access library

Example usage in Node.js