I'm using angular in my case but it's a general question as well. Also I'm aware of other front end ORM solutions like js-data and restacular but that's a different story.
Given a People collection made of several Person instances:
[
{ name: "Bob" },
{ name: "Dave" },
{ name: "Sarah" }
]
How can each Person instance have the ability (method) to push a new instance of itself with inherited properties into its parent collection? Let's say a Person instance looks like this:
{
name: "Bob",
parent: [ /* circular reference to collection */ ],
extend: function(attrs) { /* returns new object */ },
create: function(attrs) {
var self = this;
//call factory method to create object
var person = self.extend(attrs);
//some http call to persist to backend
.then(function() {
//push new instance to parent so it's rendered in the view model
self.parent.push(person);
});
}
}
Maybe this method of encapsulation is bad...I'm not sure. I made a plnkr that attempts to create a directive that inherits a JSON stringified circular reference (not good) via two way binding.
directive
angular
.module("app", [])
.directive("appDirective", function() {
return {
scope: { data: "=appDirective" },
bindToController: true,
controllerAs: "vm"
};
});
html
<div app-directive="{foo: 'bar', info: vm.info}">{{vm.data}}</div>
inside parent controller
this.info = {};
//setup circular reference
this.info.info = this.info
How can I retain the luxury of circular references in my ORM while getting around the circular JSON stringify problem?
You'll need to write your own stringify, pulling out the objects to a reference array and replacing them with the reference array key. Or you can use the jsog library that I have found useful
also, this StackOverflow answer if you are interested in trying to do it yourself