Loading & Editing an existing document

Each document is stored as part of a collection, where a collection is a set of documents sharing the same entity type.

Therefore, if you have the id of an existing document (for example the previously saved BlogPost entry), it can be loaded in the following manner:

// BlogPosts/1 is entity of type BlogPost with Id of 1
BlogPost existingBlogPost = session.Load<BlogPost>("BlogPosts/1");

This results in the HTTP communication shown below (prettified for clarity):

GET /docs/BlogPosts/1 HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: deflate,gzip
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Host: 127.0.0.1:8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Last-Modified: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:37:01 GMT
ETag: 00000000-0000-0100-0000-000000000002
Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
Raven-Entity-Name: Blogs
Raven-Clr-Type: Blog
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:39:41 GMT
Content-Length: 214

{
  "Title": "Hello RavenDB",
  "Category": "RavenDB",
  "Content": "This is a blog about RavenDB",
  "Comments": [
    {
      "Title": "Unrealistic",
      "Content": "This example is unrealistic"
    },
    {
      "Title": "Nice",
      "Content": "This example is nice"
    }
  ]
}

Changes can then be made to that object in the usual manner:

existingBlogPost.Title = "Some new title";

Flushing those changes to the document store is achieved in the usual way:

session.SaveChanges();

You don't have to call an Update method, or track any changes yourself. RavenDB will do all of that for you.

For the above example, the above example will result in the following HTTP message:

POST /bulk_docs HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: deflate,gzip
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Host: 127.0.0.1:8080
Content-Length: 501
Expect: 100-continue

[
  {
    "Key": "BlogPosts/1",
    "Etag": null,
    "Method": "PUT",
    "Document": {
      "Title": "Some new title",
      "Category": "RavenDB",
      "Content": "This is a blog about RavenDB",
      "Comments": [
        {
          "Title": "Unrealistic",
          "Content": "This example is unrealistic"
        },
        {
          "Title": "Nice",
          "Content": "This example is nice"
        }
      ]
    },
    "Metadata": {
      "Content-Encoding": "gzip",
      "Raven-Entity-Name": "Blogs",
      "Raven-Clr-Type": "Blog",
      "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8",
      "@etag": "00000000-0000-0100-0000-000000000002"
    }
  }
]   


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:39:41 GMT
Content-Length: 280

[
  {
    "Etag": "00000000-0000-0100-0000-000000000003",
    "Method": "PUT",
    "Key": "BlogPosts/1",
    "Metadata": {
      "Content-Encoding": "gzip",
      "Raven-Entity-Name": "Blogs",
      "Raven-Clr-Type": "Blog",
      "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8",
      "@id": "BlogPosts/1"
    }
  }
]