Cake Angular Transforms

This simple module is for transforming CakePHP's Model/RelatedModel JSON serialisation format into something a little more sane for use in client-side applications. It's packaged as a pair of AngularJS transform functions, but since these are simply functions that transform serialised strings into JSON data you might find this useful with any browser app that needs to integrate with CakePHP RESTful routes.

For example, a typical CakePHP response from a GET request to one of its JSON _serialized endpoints might look like this:

{
  "some_things": [
    "SomeThing": {
      "id": 1,
      "name": "A thing"
    },
    "SomeThingStep": [
      {
        "id": 1,
        "step": "Do a thing",
        "StepImage": {
          "id": 123,
          "url": "/images/124.jpg"
        }
      },
      {
        "id": 2,
        "step": "Do another thing",
        "StepImage": {
          "id": 124,
          "url": "/images/126.jpg"
        }
      }
    ]
  ]
}

After transforming it would look like this:

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "name": "A thing",
    "steps": [
      {
        "id": 1,
        "step": "Do a thing",
        "image": {
          "id": 123,
          "url": "/images/124.jpg"
        }
      },
      {
        "id": 2,
        "step": "Do another thing",
        "image": {
          "id": 123,
          "url": "/images/126.jpg"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
]

Cake Transforms supports associations, contained associations, individual records and list records.

Installation & Requirements

To install, simply get it from npm

npm install cake-angular-transforms

Usage

In order to actually use it, you'll need to be building your browser bundle with Browserify, and then require it and augment your $httpProvider transforms stack. Be sure to push it on the stack after Angular's default JSON decoder/encoder

angular = require('angular');
cakeTransforms = require('cake-angular-transforms');

var myMod = angular.module('myMod', []);

myMod.config(function($httpProvider) {
  // ... config function
   
  // Push it onto the response stack after the JSON decoder
  $httpProvider.defaults.transformResponse.push(cakeTransforms.transformResponse);
  
  // Unshift it onto the request stack before the JSON encoder
  $httpProvider.defaults.transformRequest.unshift(cakeTransforms.transformRequest);
});

You can also augment individual $http or $resource config objects if you aren't using CakePHP for all your http requests.

Building

You can run the tests via npm, running tests written in Mocha. You don't need browserify to run the tests, since they're just javascript object transform functions.

npm test

The development source is written with coffee-script, so make sure you install the dev dependencies before working on the module.