faceted¶ ↑
Faceted
provides a set of tools, patterns, and modules for use in API implementations.
It was written and is maintained by Corey Ehmke (@bantik) and Max Thom Stahl (@villainous) at Trunk Club.
Presenters¶ ↑
Let’s say that you have an ActiveRecord model called Musician, and you want to expose it through your API using a Presenter pattern. Faceted
makes it easy. Create a new class namespaced inside of your API like so:
module MyApi class Musician include Faceted::Presenter presents :musician field :name field :genre field :instrument, :default => 'guitar' end end
That’s actually all you have to do. The presents
method maps your Musician presenter to a root-level class called Musician
, and the field
methods map to attributes or methods on the associated AR Musician instance. If a default is set for a field, that default value will be stored when the presenter is used to create a record, unless overridden.
What’s that, you say? How is the appropriate AR Musican record associated? Simple. Invoke an instance of the MyApi::Musician
passing in an :id
parameter, and it just works:
m = Musician.create(:name => 'Johnny Cash', :genre => 'Western') m.id => 13 presenter = MyApi::Musician.new(:id => 13) presenter.name => "Johnny Cash"
You can also invoke methods on AR instances using the same syntax. Let’s say that your base Musician
class has a random_song_title
method that returns one of the musician’s popular songs. Simply wire up the method in your presenter:
field :random_song_title
That’s it.
presenter.random_song_title => "Ring of Fire"
Relationships work almost the same way. If Musician
actually has_one
birthplace, and includes a birthplace_id
attribute, wire it up like this:
field :birthplace_id
Create a presenter for the associated Birthplace model:
module MyApi class Birthplace include Faceted::Presenter presents :birthplace field :city field :state end end
Now your Musician
presenter responds the way it should:
presenter.birthplace.city => "Kingsland"
It’s smart enough to identify that birthplace_id
indicates a relationship and builds the association for you. If you don’t want it to do this, simply pass the skip_association
flag:
field :record_label_id, :skip_association => true
You can also explicitly declare the class of the association:
field :genre_id, :class_name => ‘MusicalGenre’
Presenters from Existing Models¶ ↑
In your controllers, you will typically be using one of three methods to instantiate a presenter: new
, materialize
, or from
.
new¶ ↑
This method is used to retrieve and instantiate a persisted model based on an id
:
m = Musician.create(:name => 'Bauhaus', :genre => 'Goth') m.id => 213 presenter = MyApi::Musician.new(:id => 213) presenter.name => "Bauhaus"
materialize¶ ↑
Have an array of objects that you need translated into presenters? No problem. Use the materialize
class method on the presenter class:
musicians = [ ::Musician.new(:name => 'Love and Rockets'), ::Musician.new(:name => 'The Pixies') ] presenters = MyApi::Musician.materialize(musicians) presenters.first.name => 'Love and Rockets'
from¶ ↑
If you have an single instance of a persisted model already loaded, or if you’re presenting a class that does not get read from a database (e.g. an object from an API response), you can use the from
class method to materialize a single presenter object:
musician_from_json_response = ::Musician.new(:name => 'Dust and a Shadow') presenter = MyApi::Musician.from(musician_from_json_response) presenter.name => 'Dust and a Shadow'
Collectors¶ ↑
Collectors are simply models that collect multiple instances of another model. An example:
module MyApi class Playlist include Faceted::Collector collects :musicians, :find_by => :genre_id collects :deejays #implicit find_by, using 'playlist_id' end end l = MyApi::Playlist.new(:genre_id => 3) l.musicians.count => 14 l.musicians.first.name => "American Music Club"
Controllers¶ ↑
Wiring up your controllers is easy. Start with your base controller:
class MyApi::BaseController < ActionController::Base require 'faceted' include Faceted::Controller before_filter :authenticate_user! respond_to :json rescue_from Exception, :with => :render_500 rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, :with => :render_404 end
Then create the controllers for your API-specific models:
class MyApi::MusiciansController < MyApi::BaseController def show @musician = MyApi::Musician.new(params) render_response @musician end def update @musician = MyApi::Musician.new(params) @musician.save render_response @musician end end
Contributing to faceted¶ ↑
-
Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn’t been implemented or the bug hasn’t been fixed yet.
-
Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn’t requested it and/or contributed it.
-
Fork the project.
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Start a feature/bugfix branch.
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Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution.
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Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
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Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.
Copyright¶ ↑
Copyright © 2012 Trunk Club. See LICENSE.txt for further details.