Readers are used to interpret data to be loaded into a Model instance or a Store - usually in response to an AJAX request. This is normally handled transparently by passing some configuration to either the Model or the Store in question - see their documentation for further details.
Loading Nested Data
Readers have the ability to automatically load deeply-nested data objects based on the associations configured on each Model. Below is an example demonstrating the flexibility of these associations in a fictional CRM system which manages a User, their Orders, OrderItems and Products. First we'll define the models:
Ext.define("User", {
extend: 'Ext.data.Model',
fields: [
'id', 'name'
],
hasMany: {model: 'Order', name: 'orders'},
proxy: {
type: 'rest',
url : 'users.json',
reader: {
type: 'json',
root: 'users'
}
}
});
Ext.define("Order", {
extend: 'Ext.data.Model',
fields: [
'id', 'total'
],
hasMany : {model: 'OrderItem', name: 'orderItems', associationKey: 'order_items'},
belongsTo: 'User'
});
Ext.define("OrderItem", {
extend: 'Ext.data.Model',
fields: [
'id', 'price', 'quantity', 'order_id', 'product_id'
],
belongsTo: ['Order', {model: 'Product', associationKey: 'product'}]
});
Ext.define("Product", {
extend: 'Ext.data.Model',
fields: [
'id', 'name'
],
hasMany: 'OrderItem'
});
This may be a lot to take in - basically a User has many Orders, each of which is composed of several OrderItems. Finally, each OrderItem has a single Product. This allows us to consume data like this:
{
"users": [
{
"id": 123,
"name": "Ed",
"orders": [
{
"id": 50,
"total": 100,
"order_items": [
{
"id" : 20,
"price" : 40,
"quantity": 2,
"product" : {
"id": 1000,
"name": "MacBook Pro"
}
},
{
"id" : 21,
"price" : 20,
"quantity": 3,
"product" : {
"id": 1001,
"name": "iPhone"
}
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
The JSON response is deeply nested - it returns all Users (in this case just 1 for simplicity's sake), all of the Orders for each User (again just 1 in this case), all of the OrderItems for each Order (2 order items in this case), and finally the Product associated with each OrderItem. Now we can read the data and use it as follows:
var store = new Ext.data.Store({
model: "User"
});
store.load({
callback: function() {
//the user that was loaded
var user = store.first();
console.log("Orders for " + user.get('name') + ":")
//iterate over the Orders for each User
user.orders().each(function(order) {
console.log("Order ID: " + order.getId() + ", which contains items:");
//iterate over the OrderItems for each Order
order.orderItems().each(function(orderItem) {
//we know that the Product data is already loaded, so we can use the synchronous getProduct
//usually, we would use the asynchronous version (see Ext.data.BelongsToAssociation)
var product = orderItem.getProduct();
console.log(orderItem.get('quantity') + ' orders of ' + product.get('name'));
});
});
}
});
Running the code above results in the following:
Orders for Ed:
Order ID: 50, which contains items:
2 orders of MacBook Pro
3 orders of iPhone
Name of the property within a row object that contains a record identifier value. Defaults to The id of the model. If an idProperty is explicitly specified it will override that of the one specified on the model
True to automatically parse models nested within other models in a response object. See the Ext.data.reader.Reader intro docs for full explanation. Defaults to true.
The name of the property which contains a response message. This property is optional.
The name of the property which contains a response message. This property is optional.
Required. The name of the property which contains the Array of row objects. Defaults to undefined. An exception will be thrown if the root property is undefined. The data packet value for this property should be an empty array to clear the data or show no data.
Name of the property from which to retrieve the success attribute. Defaults to success. See Ext.data.proxy.Proxy.exception for additional information.
Name of the property from which to retrieve the total number of records in the dataset. This is only needed if the whole dataset is not passed in one go, but is being paged from the remote server. Defaults to total.
Takes a raw response object (as passed to this.read) and returns the useful data segment of it. This must be implemented by each subclass
The responce object
The useful data from the response
Reads the given response object. This method normalizes the different types of response object that may be passed to it, before handing off the reading of records to the readRecords function.
The response object. This may be either an XMLHttpRequest object or a plain JS object
The parsed ResultSet object
Abstracts common functionality used by all Reader subclasses. Each subclass is expected to call this function before running its own logic and returning the Ext.data.ResultSet instance. For most Readers additional processing should not be needed.
The raw data object
A ResultSet object