All applications that use WiredTiger will be structured roughly as follows. The code below is taken from the complete example program \ex_ref{ex_access.c}.
\section basic_connection Connecting to a database
To access a database, first open a connection with the following code:
\skip main
\until wiredtiger_open
Here the configuration string \c "create" is passed to ::wiredtiger_open to indicate that the database should be created if it does not exist when the program starts running.
\section basic_session Opening a Session
Next we open a session handle for the single thread accessing the database:
\until Note
The code block above also shows simple error handling with ::wiredtiger_strerror. The default behavior for more detailed errors is to write them to \c stderr. That can be overridden by passing an implementation of WT_ERROR_HANDLER to ::wiredtiger_open or WT_CONNECTION::open_session.
\section basic_create_table Creating a Table
If the database was created by the ::wiredtiger_open call above, it will be empty. We now create a table that we can use to store data:
\until ;
This call creates a table called \c "access", configured to use strings for its key and value columns. We go into more details about what is possible later in the section on \ref schema.
\section basic_cursors Accessing Data With Cursors
Now that we're sure we have a table, we open a cursor to perform some operations on it:
Here, the string \c "table:access" specifies that we are opening the cursor on the table named \c "access" that we created above.
The WT_CURSOR::set_key and WT_CURSOR::set_value calls marshal the application's data into the cursor. The WT_CURSOR::insert call then creates a record containing that data and inserts it into the table.
Now we iterate through all of the records in the table, printing them out as we go:
\until }
Note that the key and value parts of the records are returned as C strings because the table was created that way (even if it was created by a previous run of the example). No extracting or converting of needs to be done in the application.
If we weren't using the cursor for the call to WT_CURSOR::insert above, this loop would simplify to:
\code
while ((ret = cursor->next(cursor)) == 0) {
...
}
\endcode
\section basic_close Closing Handles
Lastly, we close the connection, which implicitly closes the cursor and session handles:
