SpiffyJr's Blogaroo

Greetings! Long time no post, I know. I’ve been busy with PetWise and as well as the occasional game of Heroes of Newerth and/or WoW arenas. This little post will attempt to help those working with JsonRestStore (JRS) when their API doesn’t output exactly what JRS is expecting. What we’re going to be doing is extending dojox.data.JsonRestStore and creating our own store in its place while overriding the _processResults() method.

The first thing you will want to do is register a Dojo module path so that Dojo knows exactly where to find your custom store. In my example, I’m going to be using Zend Framework so in my application.ini file I simply include a line like resources.dojo.modulePaths.blitz = “/js/dojo/blitz”. We’ll also want to be sure that we require the appropriate class when working with our new store. You can do this globally in the application.ini by adding resources.dojo.requireModules[] = “blitz.data.JsonRestStore” or by adding it to whatever page the store will be used in.

Next, you’ll need to declare the class by creating the file. In my example, I create a file called JsonRestStore.js in /js/dojo/blitz/data.

// /js/dojo/blitz/data/JsonRestStore.js

dojo.provide("blitz.data.JsonRestStore");
dojo.require("dojox.data.JsonRestStore");

// declare the store extending from JsonRestStore
dojo.declare("blitz.data.JsonRestStore", dojox.data.JsonRestStore, {
        // process results takes the results from getQuery and turns them into something the store can handle
        _processResults:function(results, deferred) {
                // custom format for blitz api
                results = results.result; // this simple line causes JsonRestStore to work with my own API implementation
                // index the results
                var count = results.length;
                // if we don't know the length, and it is partial result, we will guess that it is twice as big, that will work for most widgets
                return {totalCount:deferred.fullLength || (deferred.request.count == count ? (deferred.request.start || 0) + count * 2 : count), items: results};
        }
});

Here’s a dump of my profiles API inside of Blitzaroo to show why this works. Notice that all the data comes from the result key which is why I have the line results = results.result. This allows me to include extra information about the request whenever the API is hit.

{
  -request: {
    uri: "/api/profiles"
    format: "json"
    action: "list"
  }
  -result: [
    -{
      id: 1
      userId: 1
      name: "Igatchew"
      private: false
      -created: {
        date: "2011-03-25 15:50:20"
        timezone_type: 3
        timezone: "America/Chicago"
      }
    -updated: {
        date: "2011-03-25 15:50:22"
        timezone_type: 3
        timezone: "America/Chicago"
      }
    }
   -{
      id: 2
      userId: 1
      name: "Snaggins"
      private: true
      -created: {
        date: "2011-03-25 20:32:34"
        timezone_type: 3
        timezone: "America/Chicago"
      }
      -updated: {
        date: "2011-03-25 20:32:36"
        timezone_type: 3
        timezone: "America/Chicago"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Hope that’s helpful!