how do I …

… insert a new Document?

• Using your favorite HTTP command line tool (e.g. curl), library (e.g. RestSharp), or Chrome app (e.g. PostMan), POST a JSON Document to the /db/{collection} endpoint. The target Document Collection will be auto-created if it doesn’t exist yet.
  
• ExpandoDB will return a response like so:

… search for Documents?

• Let’s go back to our reuters Document Collection. For search, we only need to send GET requests, so we can simply use Chrome (with JSONView).
• Say we want to search for the top 10 news articles with the word petroleum in the title, sorted by the date in descending order; plus we only want to see the title, date, and text fields.
• Now let’s search for the top 10 news articles that mention the words OPEC, petroleum, and price in any part of the article (tile, text). We want to sort the matching articles by date in descending order. We want to see the title, and date fields. We also want to see the _highlight field - which displays, for each Document, a text fragment that contains the search term(s); the matching search terms are enclosed in HTML tags that will render as higlights in a web browser. The _highlight field is typically used when the Documents are large (e.g. extracted from whole PDF or MS-Word documents) and it’s not practical to retrieve and display all Document fields in the search results UI.
  
• Now let’s search for news articles with any word that starts with petrol* in any part of the article; we only want articles published in February 1987 (i.e. between 1987-02-01 and 1987-02-28).
• To allow for minor misspellings in the query terms, we can do a fuzzy search by appending ~ to the search term. For example, let’s search for news articles with indonisea (note the misspelling) in the title. Fuzzy search is based on the Damerau–Levenshtein distance. Note that the max edit distance supported is 2, which is the default; so we could have written the query below as indonisea~.
• Finally let’s search for news articles with no title. ExpandoDB uses a special token to denote missing (i.e. null) values: _null_. The token can be modified in the application config file.
• See this article to learn more about the query syntax.

…update an existing Document?

• Let’s go back to the books Document Collection and update all the fields of a specific book - let’s add the word ‘UPDATED’ to the title, author, and description. We do this using the PUT API.
• Let’s check if the book was updated.
• Now let’s make a few partial changes to our book. Let’s add a new array field called reviews. In addition, let’s update the title field and remove the word UPDATED from it. We do both of these modifications in one transaction using the PATCH API. To learn more about the syntax of the PATCH API, see the JSON-Patch standard defined in RFC6902. Note that ExpandoDB only supports the following PATCH operations: add, remove, and replace.
• Let’s see if the book was updated.

…delete an existing Document?

• Again using the books Document Collection, let’s delete a specific book. We do this using the DELETE API, specifying the book’s Document ID as parameter.
• If we try to retrieve the book, we will get a 404.

…drop an entire Document Collection?

• Lets drop the entire books Document Collection. We do this using the DELETE API, specifying just the Collection name.
• If we try to view the books Document Collection, we will get a 404.

…see what Document Collections are available in the Database, and what their fields are?

• Simply send a GET request to the /db/_schemas endpoint.
• You will notice that ExpandoDB creates additional fields for each Document:
  • _id is the unique identifier for the Document
  • _createdTimestamp is the date/time (UTC) the Document was created
  • _modifiedTimestamp is the date/time (UTC) the Document was last modified
  • _full_text is the full-text representation of the Document (i.e. concatenation of all the fields of the Document).

At this point, we can now work with the full Reuters-21578 dataset.

• Drop the reuters Collection.
• Go to the Loader\reuters directory and extract the contents of reuters21578.tar.gz to the same directory.
• Run Loader.exe to load the contents of all the files (this will take a few minutes to complete).
• Try out the REST API endpoints against the full Reuters-21578 dataset.