backbone-relational-jsonapi
Overloads Backbone.Collection
and Backbone.Relational.Model
parse
methods to add compatibility with the JSONapi protocol.
Installation
$ npm install backbone-relational-jsonapi
Documentation
Node
First, install the package:
npm install backbone-relational-jsonapi --save-dev
Then require it:
var _ = require('underscore'),
Backbone = require('backbone');
Backbone.Relational = require('backbone-relational');
require('backbone-relational-jsonapi')(Backbone, _);
Browser
First include the script after backbone and underscore.
<script src="underscore.js"></script>
<script src="backbone.js"></script>
<script src="backbone-relational-jsonapi.js"></script>
Then boot it up.
backboneRelationalJsonapi(Backbone, _);
Currently supported
The library is currently able to parse
- The
data
object - The
relationships
objects - The
included
objects
Parsing a compound object
To parse a compound object, the library first checks if something is present in the included
object and creates the corresponding instances using the id
and type
attributes. To do this, it uses a common model factory that looks up the class names depending on the type
.
In your classes, specify a default type
value, like
var Tag = Backbone.RelationalModel.extend({
defaults: {
type: 'tags'
}
}
and then register this class in the model factory, like
Backbone.modelFactory.registerModel(Tag);
This way, compound objecs containing tags
objects will be parsed and the included instances of Tag
will be available to other objects for relationships.
Meta objects
Meta objects are supported and their treatment is delegated to the model or collection that is parsing the incoming data. When a meta
object is found within the response, the function handleMeta
is called on this
. If the function is not defined, then the meta
object is ignored.
Be careful: this function is called before the parse
function has actually returned, so you won't be able to access the parsed data from the handeMeta
scope.
Examples
Here's an example of an articles
object that can be parsed by the library
{
"data": {
"type": "articles",
"id": "1",
"attributes": {
"title": "The title of the article",
"url": "http://article.com/article-id",
"date": 1423094400,
"thumbnail": "thumbnail.png",
},
}
"relationships": {
"tags": {
"data": [
{
"type": "tags",
"id": "10"
},
]
}
},
"included": [
{
"type": "tags",
"id": "10",
"attributes": {
"name": "geeks"
}
}
]
}
Which, Backbone-side would be expressed like
var Article = Backbone.RelationalModel.extend({
defaults: {
type: 'articles'
},
relations: [{
type: Backbone.HasMany,
key: 'tags',
relatedModel: Tag // Refers to the Tag class defined above
}]
});
Not supported
Currently, the support of the JSONapi specification is partial. Work still needs to be done.
- Links