The generated API documentation in ArangoDB 2.6 has been updated to Swagger 2. To see the API documentation for any of your Foxx apps, open the web admin frontend and select your app from the Applications tab. For information on how to describe your own APIs in the generated documentation, see the ArangoDB documentation.

I just stumbled upon a comment in the ArangoDB blog asking how to create a diff of two documents with AQL.

Though there is no built-in AQL function to diff two documents, it is easily possible to build your own like in the following query.

ArangoDB 2.6 comes with new and changed APIs as well as changed behavior regarding document keys and several graph functions.

If you use Travis-CI for your tests you can download the Travis-CI ArangoDB build here: Travis-CI/ArangoDB-2.6.0-alpha2.tar.gz

The changes so far:

APIs added

• added batch document removal and lookup APIs:

  These APIs can be used to perform multi-document lookup and removal operations efficiently. The arguments to these APIs are the name of the collection plus the array of document keys to fetch or remove.

  The endpoints for these APIs are as follows:

  PUT..

Our next major release ArangoDB 2.6 is on the finishing straight with an early alpha2 version for Linux released today.

In the last days we prepared everything for the first technical preview of ArangoDB 2.6, testing new and improved functionality and adding some small last minute features like the AQL explain command in the Web UI. We are proud of the new release and can’t wait to give it in your hands. Stay tuned, follow @arangodb to get the news first

Meanwhile last week we published a 2.5.4 maintenance release and provide a short glimpse on added features like Foxx dependencies for more composable Foxx Apps and Improved System User Authentication.

For developers that use the ArangoDB shell arangosh the explain() command and its compact output format is a great resource to check AQL queries. Explain prints the original query, the generated query execution plan, the applied optimizer rules plus the list of indexes that will be used. Jan showed in a blog post how this can look like.

While preparing ArangoDB 2.6 we found some time to add this feature to the Web UI. So now you can check you AQL queries right in the Web-Interface as well.

ArangoDB can easily be configured to require HTTP authentication for access to the web admin frontend or the REST API. But while Basic Auth works fine for APIs, the user experience in the web admin frontend was decidedly sub-par: browsers would often persist the authentication credentials indefinitely, logging out was made difficult or impossible and switching users was hit-or-miss.

The upcoming ArangoDB 2.6 release introduces cookie-based authentication for the web admin frontend, allowing you to side-step the issue altogether by using the built-in session manager instead of the low-level..

This version is deprecated. Download the new version of ArangoDB

Previously on the ArangoDB blog we saw how we can use the configuration field in manifest.json to make Foxx apps configurable and more re-usable. This is all well and good if we just want to pass in simple values to a Foxx app but sometimes you want to pass in entire Foxx apps. This is where dependencies come in to save the day.

Let’s say you want to use the session storage provided by the ArangoDB sessions app available on the Foxx app store using Foxx exports and imports. Because you hadn’t yet heard of configurations, you simply hard-coded the mount path of your copy of the sessions app in..

ArangoDB can be used as a backend data source for APIs that you compose with the popular open-source LoopBack Node.js framework.

In a recent blog article on StrongLoop, Nicholas Duffy explains how to use his new loopback-connector-arango connector to access ArangoDB:

Getting Started with the Node.js LoopBack Connector for ArangoDB

The tutorial uses the loopback-connector-arango which is available as npm and a demo application which is available from Github.