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.

But wait, there’s more! In addition to being shown in the web admin frontend, ArangoDB 2.6 allows you to mount your app’s documentation inside the app itself. Using the new controller method apiDocumentation you can define a mount point for the app’s own documentation and apply the same access controls you already use for other routes. Depending on your needs, you can even mount the documentation of other apps in your own Foxx app, use different assets or even your own Swagger API description files. In fact, the new API documentation viewer of the web admin frontend itself is using it.

For more information on the apiDocumentation method, see the documentation. If you want to give the feature a try yourself, check out ArangoDB 3.0 or compile the latest development version from the GitHub repository.

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 your code: (more…)