Add a bulk constructor to the ResourceLinker

[ciaranj]

Hi, I'm currently experimenting with options for HATEOAS components for my RESTful API ;) , so have been taking a looksy at your implementation of JSON+Hal.

I use Spring as my IoC container and struggled to configure your 'ResourceLinker' class effectively in my environment.

To combat this I added a fairly brutal new constructor to the class to allow all the resource linkers to be specified up front, in theory that might be useful to others too :)

Example config looks like this :

<object id="ResourceLinker" type="WebApi.Hal.ResourceLinker" singleton="true" lazy-init="true">
  <constructor-arg>
    <dictionary key-type="System.Type" value-type="System.Object">
      <entry value-ref="AppleLinker"><key><expression value="T(MyAPI.Resources.AppleResource)"/></key> </entry>
    </dictionary>
  </constructor-arg>    
</object>

Hope it helps.

[JakeGinnivan]

Hey,

Thanks. I will be working on this tonight, the resource linker is pretty clunky at the moment and I plan on cleaning it up. I will either pull this in, or give you a nicer approach very soon

[ciaranj]

I'm looking at creating some spring factories to 'hunt and gather' linkers so I don't need to define them, fwiw :)

[JakeGinnivan]

If they are simple I might just add into the Wiki once I settle on the API, I will be using autofac so I will have a similar setup for it.

[JakeGinnivan]

I have added an overload which will find and register all linkers from an assembly if that helps

[ciaranj]

Cool, sounds like what I was doing too. Incidentally the more I'm working in this area the more I'm thinking that what's currently down as a 'Resource' and 'ResourceLinker', might (possibly?) be more accurately named 'Representation' and 'RepresentationLinker', and the ApiController is closer to the actually 'Resource' (where resource maps onto URI, and Representation is what is returned from methods) ... what do you think?

[JakeGinnivan]

Good point actually, representation is a better name. Have a look at the latest additions, there is a heap new code in there which has been added over the last few days

[ciaranj]

Ok, will do.