Azure documentdb how to develop server side?

Question

as a total JavaScript beginner, how do I actually develop for it? I mean, I've seen https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/documentdb-programming/ but there was no mentioning of a development environment.

Is there something like a visual studio project template for server-side javascript?

Answer 1

I use node.js so your mileage may vary if you are developing from .NET, but here's what I do:

1. First of all, I created an npm package documentdb-utils. It is a wrapper for the DocumentDB node.js package that makes it easier to do a bunch of things.
2. Then, I created npm package documentdb-mock to write tests for my stored procedures. The source code for documentdb-mock includes 4 example stored procedures along with a test suite for each using nodeunit. You can start with these as they exercise most of the server-side API.
3. After I have them passing my local unit tests, I write integration tests that exercise my system end-to-end including creating any necessary data for each test run. The only problems that I've found here with sprocs that I didn't see in my mocked testing had to do with reaching certain limits... although, documentdb-mock has been upgraded to simulate many of these now also.
4. I haven't open sourced this yet, but I have also written a parser/rewriter that will embed any require(d) packages into my sprocs before sending them to DocumentDB. This allows me to write and test in a nicely factored way on node.js even using downloaded packages from within my sprocs, but when they get pushed to DocumentDB any dependencies are automatically embedded inside of the function. I'll open source that at some point (probably adding it to documentdb-utils) but I can share it with you now if you desire.