@lore/models

Purpose

Create a Model for every file in src/models and expose the resultant Models on lore.models.

Dependant Hooks

None.

Needed improvements

1. PascalCase the models that get exposed on lore.models (i.e. lore.models.Todo instead of lore.models.todo)

Override Rules

Models typically need three things in order to be able to fetch a collection of resources

1. The URL of the API server to hit
2. The path to hit on the server (/todos for example)
3. A method to parse the server response (such as to convert timestamps or moment.js objects or something)

For apps that only have a single API server, the endpoint the models should use is the same the app is configured for by default. So that can be obtained from apiRoot in config/models.js. The path that should be appended to the API Root can be derived from the model name (todo) and whether or not pluraize has been set to true or false in config/models.js.

Then we just need to know how to parse the data, and for apps where the attribute field names in the models mirror those in the API reponse (which is typical for new applications), even that method might be the same, especially if you just want to convert globally applied timestamps like createdAt and updatedAt to an easier to work with format like a moment.js object (unless you prefer to do the conversion in your components).

So for that scenario, the parse method can be pulled from config/models.js.

For apps that have been around for a while, and have survived API changes, it's not uncommon to have the parse methods be a little more specific to that model, such as renaming fields befor the client code uses it to prevent API changes from rippling through th applications. For those scenarios, you may find yourself starting to populate files like src/models/todo.js.

And if you're application consumes data from more than one API server, you'll also need to update the urlRoot in the individual src/models/todo.js files so they know which server they should talk to.

So given all of that, the models hook builds the configuration for each Model it creates using a set of rules.

1. It first pulls in config/models.js to get the apiRoot and pluralize setting.
2. It then overrides that config with anything it finds in the individual config file located at src/models/todo.js, which will also include the parse method collections should use.
3. Finally, it fills in anything that still hasn't been defined using conventions (such as deriving the urlRoot from the model name and the pluralize setting).

Example Usage

Given a project where a todo model has been created like so:

src
|-models
  |-todo.js

This hook will find it, create a Model from it (using a combination of the data in config/models.js and src/models/todos.js, and expose the Model on lore.models.todo.