nested structures possible?

[fwoeck]

Hi Ben,

thank your for the plugin! Do you have a recommendation concerning nested models with arrays? It seems, that var post = new Post({ foo: ["bar","baz"] }) works well until I save it via REST - rails moans about the array instead of a hash. Is it a bad idea overall, or do you think it would be possible to tweak rails' params-parsing or write an other persistence strategy?

-- Frank

[fwoeck]

ahh sorry, I was sloppy with the routes - saving works via REST for e.g. var post = new Post({foo: ['bar','baz'], one: {two: ['three','four']}}); -- Frank

[benpickles]

Coincidentally I hit a similar issue with an array of objects and the solution was to JSON.stringify the data and upload it with a content type of application/json. It worked great with Rails 3 and required no changes but I haven't tried it with Rails 2 and it could possibly require some changes to server-side code.

I expect js-model v0.9 will do things this way. It makes sense to work with JSON in both directions, what do you think?

[fwoeck]

that sounds good! Two things I noticed:

• When I create a nested model on js-side, that contains arrays, they come into rails as hash with prefixed indexes (see taks):

{"block"=>{"discount"=>"1", "sum_enabled"=>"true", "header"=>"Some title", "tasks"=>{"0"=>{"cost"=>"240", "resource"=>"sysadmin", "time"=>"1", "description"=>"stuff Ä"}, "1"=>{"cost"=>"275", "resource"=>"developer", "time"=>"3.5", "description"=>"stuff Ü"}, "2"=>{"cost"=>"260", "resource"=>"uxdesigner", "time"=>"2.25", "description"=>"stuff ß"}}}}

witch is not critical but would be nice to avoid. The other thing: there is no way to get models from the server from within the persistance layer right? This would be very convenient to have ;)

-- Frank

[benpickles]

Sending JSON (as opposed to form params) fixes the indexed hashes problem.

If you want to load via the persistence layer I would recommend trying @ahe's fork: http://github.com/ahe/js-model. I imagine there will be a few edge cases that will need ironing out but it's pretty much how I see it working. Let me know how you get on.

[fwoeck]

ahh, thank for for the hint - i'll try! -- Frank

[benpickles]

just to say that the latest js-model (v0.9) does indeed send data to the server as JSON instead of application/x-www-form-urlencoded. it also has Model.load - http://benpickles.github.com/js-model/#loading-data

[fwoeck]

thanks for the update :)

[PlasticLizard]

Speaking of nested data, does js-model support, or have a way of simulating, nested models of the kind that come from document databases? I saw in the read-me a way to simulate a relational association, I just wonder if you had a similar trick up your sleeve for an embedded association, so you could do something like MyModel.find("id").child_models.find("child_id").attr("a","b") ?