Couchbase C++ SDK Documentation

This repository hosts the documentation source for the Couchbase C++ SDK.

This branch documents the 1.0 release of the SDK. It follows the SDK 3.6 API.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please test them locally, and then submit a pull request. A guide to using asciidoc, building Antora locally, and working with our repos can be found at https://docs.couchbase.com/home/contribute/index.html (this may still be in the middle of being updated).

At a minimum, to build the docs locally, you will need this repo, docs-sdk-common, and the Server Docs repo in your Antora playbook.

If you are not sure the best way to update the docs, please raise a JIRA ticket with your suggestion, putting in as much information as possible.

TODO: Add in link to new JIRA.

Notes for Docs Maintainers

The philosophy behind the Information Architecture can be found in the meta doc.

Directory Structure

Antora modules used are as follows:

• concept-docs — discussion docs explaining SDK-relevant aspects of Couchbase; in the published docs these are now interleaved with the howtos, rather than in a separate section. This module also contains the mini landing pages which introduce each section.

• devguide/examples — the home of all code examples.

• hello-world — overview (landing page) and the introductory tutorials.

• howtos — practical explanations, with plenty of code snippets. These are the docs used by the majority of developers.

• project-docs — deployment section. Docs that you need to use the software (compatibility tables, release notes, etc.), but which are not about the software API.

• ref — reference material, such as error codes and client settings.

• ROOT — contains nav.adoc, the navigation file for this component.

Within each module, docs content is mostly found in the pages directories, as .adoc files. Occasionally, a partial fragment in a partials directory contains content reused over more than one page. Most re-use is from single-sourced content in the sdk-common repo.

Single-sourced Content

To make maintenance easier for docs of around a dozen SDKs, content that is common across SDK docsets is — wherever possible — single-sourced from the sdk-common repo.

We recognise that this adds a slight cognitive burden for the new maintainer, but one layer of abstraction seems a reasonable compromise for maintainability. To make content re-use workable, certain replaceable attributes are used. These are found in the antora.yml file.

Table 1. Attributes for Single-sourced Content

Attribute	Use
server_version:	SDK dotminor releases contain new APIs to match new Server releases. This is the release version of Couchbase Server that this SDK release accompanied. Not often needed within the SDK documentation — the server version in xref links is set with version-server: (see below).
sdk_current_version:	Sets the current patch version.
sdk_dot_minor:	The current dotminor.
sdk_dot_major:	The current major release — not often needed within the documentation.
version-server:	This is substituted into xref links to the Server, to ensure they land on the correct release version.
version-common:	The version (branch) of the single-sourced sdk-common repo. This is substituted into Antora include:: directives, to pull in content from the correct branch.
name_platform:	Allows us to name the SDK within shared content (Scala).
name-sdk:	Allows us to name the SDK within shared content (Scala SDK).
sdk_api:	The API version of this release.
sdk-api-link:	Link to the latest API Reference for the SDK.
sdk-gh-link:	Link to the source code of the SDK.

An additional attribute, page-nav-header-levels: 1, ensures that the left-hand navigation of the site opens with each topic unfurled by one level.

Page Headers

Each .adoc page contains information in the headers:

= Compatibility
:description: Platform compatibility, and features available in different SDK versions, and compatibility between Server and SDK. \
Plus notes on Cloud, networks, and AWS Lambda.
:page-aliases: ROOT:overview,ROOT:compatibility-versions-features,compatibility-versions-features
:page-toclevels: 3
:table-caption!:

The :page-aliases: directive enables Antora to build 502 redirects — meaning that inbound links from, for example, old blog posts will still work with the current docset.

:page-toclevels: should be set to 2 to include h3 headers along with h2s in the in-page navigation (right-hand nav). Leaving out this directive means that the page will default to 1, showing only h2 headers in the in-page nav. A value of 3 should not be used, save in exceptionally complicated pages like that shown (the compatibility page).

Patch Releases

Update the following files:

• antora.yml

• modules/project-docs/pages/sdk-release-notes.adoc

New Branches

Production branches use the release/x.y naming pattern (e.g. release/3.7, release/3.6). Antora uses the branch names in the playbook, but also uses the version given in the antor.yml file, to create the version navigation — so this version number must be unique within the repo for any branches included in the playbook. When creating a new branch for a new release, remember to update the antora.yml file before trying to build.

Code Sample Testing

This is in the process of being changed — documentation will appear here once this is completed.

Docs License

©2024 Couchbase, Inc. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.