Is it possible to do configuration inheritance with Require.js?

Question

I am trying to figure out the best way to do quasi-inheritance of configuration in Require.js.

I have a root webapp, then child webapps underneath in their own contexts, like this:

/
/configuration
/reporting

The root (/) webapp would have a base Require.js config object, then the configuration and reporting webapps would have their own overrides. I've gotten it to work by using the jQuery extend method, e.g.:

var rootConfig = {
    // lots of stuff here: paths, shim, and baseUrl
}
var localConfig = {
    paths: {
        // this app wants to have a different version, so override
        jqueryui: '/js/lib/ui/jquery-ui-1.8.22.custom.min'
    }
}

var mergedConfig = {};
$.extend(true, mergedConfig, rootConfig, localConfig);

require.config(mergedConfig);

This works fine, but it kind of breaks the Require.js paradigm because I have to load the jQuery library statically outside of Require.js. Any ideas how to do this more elegantly?

I've taken a look at James Burke's multipage examples which is kind of along these lines, but I don't think the point there is to inherit configuration exactly.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

I ended up just culling a non-jquery extend function from a couple other sources that does the trick, so I can keep from loading jquery before require.js does it...

var com = com || {};
com.my = com.my || {};
com.my.extend = function (obj1, obj2) {
for (var p in obj2) {
    try {
        if ( obj2[p].constructor == Object ) {
            obj1[p] = com.my.extend(obj1[p], obj2[p]);
        } else {
            obj1[p] = obj2[p];
        }
    } catch(e) {
        obj1[p] = obj2[p];
    }
}

return obj1;
}

...then use it to extend/merge the configuration objects before calling require.config, e.g.:

// merge localConfig with the root config
var com.my.mergedConfig = 
com.my.extend(com.my.rootConfig, com.my.childConfig);

// apply the configuration to require.js
require.config(com.my.mergedConfig);

Hope that helps someone else.