Links are metadata that establish one-way relationships between objects in Riak. They can be used to loosely model graph like relationships between objects in Riak.
The essential way to read and modify links via the [[REST API]] is the [[HTTP Link header|http://www.martinpayne.me.uk/experiments/HTTP/Link-Header/HTTP-Link-example.html]]. This header emulates the purpose of <link> tags in HTML, that is, establishing relationships to other HTTP resources. The format that Riak uses is like so:
```bash
Link: </riak/bucket/key>; riaktag=“tag”
```
Inside the angle-brackets (<,>) is a relative URL to another object in Riak. The “tag” portion in double-quotes is any string identifier that has a meaning relevant to your application.
Objects can have multiple links by separating them with commas. For example, if an object was a participant in a doubly-linked list of objects, it might look like this:
```bash
Link: </riak/list/1>; riaktag=“previous”, </riak/list/3>; riaktag=“next”
```
NOTE: There is no artificial limit to the number of links an object can have. But, as adding links to an object does increase that object’s size, the same guidelines that apply to your data should also apply to your links: strike a balance between size and usability.
Links in the Erlang API are stored as tuples in the object metadata of this form:
```bash
{{<<"bucket">>,<<"key">>},<<"tag">>}
```
To access the links, use “riak_object:get_metadata/1” to retrieve the metadata “dict”, and then retrieve the <<"Links">> key from that dict. Example:
```bash
1> {ok, Object} = Client:get(<<"list">>,<<"2">>,1).
2> Meta = riak_object:get_metadata(Object).
3> Links = dict:fetch(<<"Links">>, Meta).
[{{<<"list">>,<<"1">>},<<"previous">>},{{<<"list">>,<<"3">>},<<"next">>}]
```
To store links back in the object, update the dict, update the object metadata, and put the object:
```bash
4> NewMeta = dict:store(<<"Links">>, [{{<<"list">>,<<"0">>},<<"first">>}|Links], Meta).
5> NewObject = riak_object:update_metadata(Object, NewMeta).
6> Client:put(NewObject,2).
```
Link-walking (traversal) is a special case of [[MapReduce|MapReduce#Link phases]] querying, and can be accessed through the [[REST API|REST API#Link-walking]]. Link-walks start at a single input object and follow links on that object to find other objects that match the submitted specifications. More than one traversal may be specified in a single request, with any number of the intermediate results returned. The final traversal in a link-walking request always returns results.
- [[Link-walking by Example|http://blog.basho.com/2010/02/24/link-walking-by-example/]] on the Basho Blog
- [[Links and Link Walking]] on the Riak Fast Track