lore-hook-collections

Purpose

Iterates through all models in lore.models and creates a corresponding Collections for each of them. This is done so we can fetch collections of resources and not just individual resources.

Dependant Hooks

Depends on the models hook being run first as it iterates through lore.models.

Needed improvements

1. Provide an option to not create collections for certain models.
2. PascalCase the collections that get exposed on lore.collections (i.e. lore.collections.Todo instead of lore.collections.todo)

Override Rules

Collections 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, to extract the meaningful data from any paginated metadata wrapper that might exist
4. Which Model it should create and pass the resultant data to, to make sure each resource also gets parsed correctly in turn

For apps that only have a single API server, the endpoint the collections should use is the same the app is configured for by default. So that can usually be obtained from apiRoot in config/models.js. The path that should be appended to the API Root can be derived from the models (todo) and whether or not pluraize has been set to true or false in config/models.js. The Model that knows how to parse the resultant resources is typically going to be the model with the same name as the colletion (lore.models.todo). The only piece that can't be derived from other parts of the configuration is the parse method the Collection should use to extract the collection of resources from the other metadata like pagination. So that method should be specified in config/collection.js. If the API follows consistent conventions across all collection endpoints (and there's only a single API server) there isn't a common reason to ever need to define a src/collection/todo.js file. If you do, it's to override the previous semi-deriable configuration with something specific to that collection.

So given all of that, the collections hook builds the configuration for each Collection 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 config/collections.js, which will also include the parse method collections should use.
3. It then looks to see if collection file has been created in src/collections that matches the name of the model (todo in this example). If one exists, it then overrides the previous config with anything it finds in that file.
4. 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 Collection with it, and expose the collection on lore.collections.todo.