DMS access works somewhat like database access. You create a DMS::Repository object and use it as a kind of "connection" to set/get files. Each repository instance represents a single connection to the repository. It manages its own distinct set of locks on behalf of the client. The DMS::Repository class takes three arguments:

The following illustrates creating a repository instance:

require 'jw/dbi'
require 'jw/dms/repository'

db = JW::DBI::Database.new()

connected = db.open( host '127.0.0.1',
                     db: 'docs.db', 
                     username: 'jujyfruit',
                     password: 'yumyum',
                     driver: 'QPSQL' )

if not connected
  puts db.error()
end

$path  = '/path/to/dms/root'
@uuid  = '4ca89a4e-e649-11dc-b1f5-0019b96bd466' 
dms    = JW::DMS::Repository.new(db, $path, uuid)

The repository UUID corresponds to the UUID of the repository identity file. Each repository must have a single file whose sole contents contain the UUID of the repository. This file is located in {dmsroot}/000/001. Furthermore, there has to be a record in the database that points to this file whose guid value matches the UUID in the respository identity file. This mechanism ensures that the database corresponds to the file store. Writing to a file store with a different database would corrupt the file store and the database, most likely beyond the capacity to accurately determine or reverse the damage. Thus, the Repository class's constructor always performs this check and will throw an exception if the UUID does not match up with the contents of the identity file. (Setting up the identity file is covered in Section 2, “Configuration”.)

The main Repository class methods are listed in Table 2.1, “Repository Methods”. The complete RDoc documentation is here.