JavaScript Interface to Collections

This is an introduction to ArangoDB’s interface for collections and how to handle collections from the JavaScript shell arangosh. For other languages see the corresponding language API.

The most important call is the call to create a new collection.

Address of a Collection

All collections in ArangoDB have a unique identifier and a unique name. ArangoDB internally uses the collection’s unique identifier to look up collections. This identifier, however, is managed by ArangoDB and the user has no control over it. In order to allow users to use their own names, each collection also has a unique name which is specified by the user. To access a collection from the user perspective, the collection name should be used, i.e.:

Collection

db._collection(collection-name)

A collection is created by a “db._create” call.

For example: Assume that the collection identifier is 7254820 and the name is demo, then the collection can be accessed as:

db._collection("demo")

If no collection with such a name exists, then null is returned.

There is a short-cut that can be used for non-system collections:

Collection name

db.collection-name

This call will either return the collection named db.collection-name or create a new one with that name and a set of default properties.

Note: Creating a collection on the fly using db.collection-name is not recommend and does not work in arangosh. To create a new collection, please use

Create

db._create(collection-name)

This call will create a new collection called collection-name. This method is a database method and is documented in detail at Database Methods