Support mixing into or processing response data?

[kadamwhite]

It's been suggested that we mix in Underscore/Lodash functions to collection responses (#5), and it may be beneficial to provide a way to process response data objects into more structured models. (This library does not actually provide models: we should not presume how users want to structure those data models, but it might be convenient to give them the option to do so.)

This issue is for brainstorming an interface for providing these models. It may not be feasible, given the variety of data types that you can retrieve even from a single endpoint (e.g. /posts and its descendants yields Posts, Post Collections, Comments, Revisions, and Types).

[kadamwhite]

A potential consumer-facing interface for this was outlined as Option 2A in #76

[kadamwhite]

We will not implement the transformation interface suggested in #76, in order to keep this library slightly lower-level, but #221 actually provides a mechanism to accomplish the same thing -- since you can wrap (or define your own) handlers for transport behavior, it's fairly trivial to use the transport method interface to implement collection methods.

For example, to wrap response arrays in an arbitrary Collection structure,

function Collection( arr ) {
  this.data = arr;
}
Collection.prototype.pluck = function( key ) {
  return this.data.map(function( val ) {
    return val[ key ];
  });
};

function addCollectionMethodsGet( wpreq, cb ) {
  /* jshint validthis:true */
  return WPAPI.transport.get.call( this, wpreq, cb ).then(function( results ) {
    if ( Array.isArray( results ) ) {
      return new Collection( results );
    }
  });
}

var wp = new WPAPI({
  endpoint: 'http://wpapi.loc/wp-json',
  transport: {
    get: addCollectionMethodsGet
  }
});

[kadamwhite]

Closing as documented by #265