In CouchDB how do you take in parameters from REST call - json

Question

Hi so I'm new to CouchDB looks great so far, but really struggling with what must be simple to do!
I have documents structured as:
{
"_id" : "245431e914ce42e6b2fc6e09cb00184d",
"_rev": "3-2a69f0325962b93c149204aa3b1fa683",
"type": "student",
"studentID": "12345678",
"Name": "Test",
"group: "A"
}
And would like to access them them with queries such as http://couchIP/student?group=A or something like that. Are Views what I need here? I don't understand how to take the parameter from the query in the Map functions in Views. example:
function(doc,req) {
if(req.group==='A'){
emit(doc.id, doc.name);
}
}
Is my understanding of how Couch is working wrong or what's my problem here? Thanks in advance, I'm sure this is Couch 101
Already read through http://guide.couchdb.org/ but it didn't really answer the question!

Answer 1

You need views to achieve the desired results.
Define the following map function inside a view of a design document. ( let's name the view "byGroup" and assume this lives in a design document named "_design/students" )
function(doc) {
if(doc.group){
emit(doc.group,null);
}
}
Results can be obtained from the following url
http://couchIP:5984/dbname/_design/students/_view/byGroup?startkey="A"&endkey="A"&include_docs=true
To have friendly url couchdb also provides url rewriting options.

Answer 2

You need to some further reading about views and the relevance that they return key/pair values.
It's not clear what you want to return from the view so I'll guess. If you want to return the whole document you'd create a view like:
function (doc) { emit(doc.group, doc) };
This will emit the group name as a key which you can lookup against, the whole doc will be returned as the value when you look it up.
If you want to just have access to the names of those users you want to do something like:
function (doc) { emit(doc.group, doc.name) };

Answer 3

Your question arises from a misconception about what a view does. Views use map/reduce to generate a representation of your data. You have no control of the output of your view in your query because the view is updated according to changes in your DB documents only.
Using a list is also not a good option. It may seem that you can use knowledge of your request in your list to generate a different output depending on the query parameters but this is wrong because couchdb uses ETags for caching and this means that most times you will get the same answer regardless of your list parameters since the underlying documents won't have changed. There is a trick though to fool couchdb in this case and this implies using two different alternating users but I wouldn't even try this way because surely there are easier ways to achieve your objectives and you can probably solve your problem using group as a key in your map function.