Address and ETag of a Document

All documents in ArangoDB have a document handle. This handle uniquely defines a document and is managed by ArangoDB. The interface allows you to access the documents of a collection as:

db.collection.document("document-handle")

For example: Assume that the document handle, which is stored in the _id field of the document, is demo/362549 and the document lives in a collection named demo, then that document can be accessed as:

db.demo.document("demo/362549736")

Because the document handle is unique within the database, you can leave out the collection and use the shortcut:

db._document("demo/362549736")

Each document also has a document revision or ETag which is returned in the _rev field when requesting a document. The document’s key is returned in the _key attribute.