Introduction to dictionary stores

A dictionary store is a store where all streams are accessed through a UID, rather than directly by stream ID.

A dictionary store contains streams in the usual way but, in addition, the root stream is a stream dictionary, i.e. the external representation of a CStreamDictionary object, a list of two-way associations between UIDs and stream ids.

The following diagram illustrates the concept of the dictionary store.

The interface to a dictionary store is provided by the CDictionaryStore abstract class. The classes for concrete dictionary stores are derived from this abstract class; for example, CDictionaryFileStore is a concrete dictionary store class which is implemented using a file store.

Note that a dictionary store does not derive from CStreamStore, but owns a persistent store, a CPersistentStore type, and a stream dictionary, a CStreamDictionary type, as part of its implementation.

See also

File based dictionary store

Stream dictionaries

Stream ID

UID manipulation