backbone-relational-jsonapi

Overloads Backbone.Collection and Backbone.RelationalModel parse methods to add compatibility with the JSONapi protocol.

Installation

$ bower install backbone-relational-jsonapi

Documentation

Backbone and Backbone.Relational and Underscore need to be loaded before this library. Then, the parse methods are overloaded. For example, using RequireJS, you'll need to shim it as follows

require.config({
    paths : {
        'backbone': 'path/to/backbone',
        'backbone-relational': 'path/to/backbone-relational',
        'backbone-relational-jsonapi': 'path/to/backbone-relational-jsonapi'
    }
    shim: {
        'backbone' : {
            exports : 'Backbone',
            deps : ['jquery','underscore']
        },
        'backbone-relational': {
            deps: ['backbone']
        },
        'backbone-jsonapi' : {
            deps : ['backbone', 'backbone-relational','underscore']
        },
    }

To use it, you can require it at your application's boostrap like

define([
    "backbone",
    "backbone-relational",
    "backbone-jsonapi"
], function(Backbone) {
    // Your application here
});

And your instance of Backbone will use the library.

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