I am very new to elgg, so please be gentle and pardon me for any dumb questions. I have a few very basic questions about storing metadata. For each user I want to have a new field called creds (short for credits). I want to store the values as metadata. So this is what I did. I added the following piece of code where I wanted to create the metadata (and/or modify it, if it exists)

        $user = get_loggedin_user();
        if (!isset($user->creds))
            {
            $user->creds = 0;
        }
        else
        {
            $user->creds++;
        }

    Then at the place where I want to access the value of the newly created metadata ('creds') I just do the following :-

        $user = get_loggedin_user();
        if (isset($user->creds))
        {
            echo $user->creds;
        }
   
    My question is :-
    (a) How do I delete this metadata if I want to ?
    (b) The following reference page for elgg apis 
    http://reference.elgg.org/engine_2lib_2metadata_8php.html#a1614d620ec0b0d0b9531c68070ffb33c
    talks about about apis like elgg_get_metadata_from_id($id) and elgg_delete_metadata_by_id($id). I want to use these APIs but how do I get the id of the metadata that I created above ?
    (c) Are the elgg user docs outdated or am I missing something? The following website
    http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Engine/DataModel/Metadata#Trying_to_store_hashmaps
    gives examples like the following "$dob = get_metadata_byname($user_guid, 'dob')"; However when I try to use the api get_metadata_by_name I get an error message saying that the api is outdated. I am using elgg1.8

    (d) If there are alternate ways of creating, using and deleting metadat, then any examples or pointers would be most appreciated

    Thanks in advance for all your help,