JSON Format

[bgott]

Need to figure out what is the optimal format of model data to pass into the visualizer such that we aren't wasting time re-parsing anything from a string format, or using an inefficient sort/search in order to display each node with its [association] edges.

[alex-grover]

JSON would be good for this as you can just use JSON.parse from the javascript which will automatically turn it into a js object.

To do this from the Ruby end, it looks like we can do

require 'json'
JSON.generate(model)

if we want to convert an object or array. Not sure if this will work with our Model class - we should test. may require defining a to_json method ourselves to serialize all the properties.

[alex-grover]

In terms of the format, right now we're storing a hash of name->model object which should be sufficient? We changed it from an array and this is definitely better but I'm not sure how you guys are handling the lookups on the JS end.

[alex-grover]

Implemented by 6213e5b.