Simple key/value datastore methods

[ryanseys]

Pardon my noob-ish request. As far as I understand, I cannot currently do simple key / value store functionality like due to the inherent complexity of the datastore key objects:

var key = "hello"; // string or number
var value = "world"; // string or number

datastore.set(key, value, function(err) {
  if(!err) {
    // success;
  } 
});

datastore.get("hello", function(err, val) {
  val; // "world"
});

[ryanseys]

@pcostell

[beriberikix]

@pcostell @jgeewax is this why an NDB layer would be useful?

[pcostell]

It's definitely possible to build a simple key/value store on top of the Datastore. NDB however is not this. Even then you'd have to define a model with different properties.

Datastore is just a more complicated system than a key/value store. It support querying, consistency guarantees, and a large amount of unstructured data.

If you wanted to build your own wrapper, you could do something very simple like:

function KeyValueDatastore(dataset) {
  this.dataset = dataset;
}

// key is a string or int.
KeyValueDatastore.get = function(key, value, callback) {
  this.dataset.get(this.dataset.key(['KeyValue', key]), function(err, entity) {
    callback(err, 'value' in entity ? entity['value'] : None);
  }
}

// key is a string or int.
KeyValueDatastore.set = function(key, value, callback) {
  this.dataset.save({
    key : this.dataset.key(['KeyValue', key]),
    data :  {
      'value' : value
    },
    function(err, keys) {
      callback(err);
    }
  });
}

In terms of handling the key, I just chose a kind to put things into, then using the provided key as either the name or id.

[stephenplusplus]

The above could be a good case for a gcloud extension from userland.

var gcloud = require('gcloud')({/*...*/});
var keystore = require('gcloud-keystore');

var dataset = keystore(gcloud.dataset());

dataset.set('company', 'yay');
dataset.get('company', function(err, value) {});

[stephenplusplus]

https://github.com/stephenplusplus/gcloud-keystore 👍

[stephenplusplus]

Going to close -- to anyone interested, try out gcloud-keystore!