The interface NetworkedPlanet.TMAPI.ITopicMapSystem represents a connection to a TMCore system. In the TMCore system, the topic maps that it manages are each assigned a unique identifier string specifed by the Name property of the ITopicMap instance. The property ITopicMapSystem.TopicMapNames returns a read-only IList containing the Name property value of all topic maps that are currently accesible through the ITopicMapSystem. The ITopicMapSystem method GetTopicMap(String)is an access method to retrieve an ITopicMap from the ITopicMapSystem using the value of its Name property as a key.

In addition, the ITopicMapSystem interface allows you to create a new topic map in the TMCore system. To create a new topic map, you will need to specify the unqiue name under which the topic map should be stored. If you specify a name which is already in use, a TopicMapExists exception will be thrown.

An ITopicMapSystem instance cannot be created directly, the TMCore API does not publicly expose a class that implements this interface. Instead you must use the class NetworkedPlanet.TMAPI.TopicMapSystemFactory to configure and initialise an ITopicMapSystem instance. The configuration required for an ITopicMapSystem is specified as a collection of name/value pairs as shown in the following table:

The TopicMapSystemFactory class provides an overloaded method GetTopicMapSystem() that accepts this configuration information in a number of different ways. The method GetTopicMapSystem() with no arguments will configure the ITopicMapSystem instance using the local application configuration file. This file is an XML file that is named either Web.config for web applications or AppName.config for applications (e.g. MyApp.exe.config for an application called MyApp.exe). The configuration information must go in the <appSettings> element of the config file. More information about the appSettings and configuration files can be found here on the Microsoft MSDN site. An example of an application configuration file is shown below:

<?xml version="1.0" encocing="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  ...
  <appSettings>
    <add key="networkedplanet.tmcore.dbconnect"
         value="Data Source=localhost;Integrated Security=SSPI; Initial Catalog=topicmap" />
    ...
  </appSettings>
  ...
</configuration>

If you wish to retrieve the configuration information in some other way, or wish to include a hard-coded set of configuration parameters in your application, you can instead use the method GetTopicMapSystem(NameValueCollection). The NameValueCollection parameter contains the property/value pairs to configure the ITopicMapSystem that will be returned.