WiredTiger does a good job of hiding internal state from the user. However there are times the user would like to understand the state of the session, connection or transaction that is has, to assert on it and to be able to test it.

Some recent examples include:

• Checking if a transaction is active.
• Getting the value for a previously set config item, e.g. cache_max_wait_ms
• Checking if wiredtiger behaved expectedly and created the correct number of threads.

To support all use cases would be a big lift I think, so we'd need to come up with a list of the most useful things to add here. And it may end up being more than a single API. An api like session->in_transaction() would make more sense than a single api like session->get_state which returns a struct of all the things the application might want to know.

Either way this seem valueable in some form so I am opening this ticket to begin a discussion.