ActiveExtAPI

ActiveExtAPI is a rails plugin that provides a simple ExtJS CRUD api to ActiveRecord models.

It simply provides 4 additional methods to ActiveRecord::Base that will return the data expected by a ExtJS Store.

An ExtJS store can be setup with an API for crud operations.

ActiveExtAPI has a great synergy with the active-direct plugin as the combinaition will provide a CRUD interface for your Ext DirectStores with almost no code.

It can also be used with regular Controller to provide a regular REST interface to your stores.

Being generic, the library is very useful for rapid developpment of prototypes.

Using it in a production application would be hazardous in it's current state as there is no user access control mechanism meaning that any user of your application would potentially have access to all your models.

The 4 CRUD method the plugin provides are :

• ext_read
• ext_create
• ext_update
• ext_destroy

An extra api method is also provided to populate Ext Trees.

• ext_get_nodes

A Form API also handles Form loading and submit

• ext_form_load
• ext_form_submit (Not implemented yet)

Notes :

• ext_read supports most of the options taken by ActiveRecord::Base.find(:all, options = {})
• sorting is done through the Ext compliant :sort, :dir options
• records of linked models can be included in the result when using the :include options
• ext_update supports update on a linked model

See the method documentation for more details

Installation

script/plugin install [email protected]:lelag/active-ext-api.git

active-direct integration

If you have the active-direct plugin installed in your rails application, you can just call the class methods, acts_as_direct_ext_api method to make the 4 crud method available to your client.

You can then setup the api config options of your DirectStore and you're done.

If you want to set up additionnal options, you can set the baseParams of your stores accordingly.

active-direct home is at http://github.com/stonegao/active-direct

Example

in your model

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_direct_ext_api        # <- that's it

  belongs_to :author
  belongs_to :publisher
  has_and_belongs_to_many :keywords
  has_and_belongs_to_many :categories
  has_many :loans
  has_many :users, :through => :loans
  has_many :following_books, :class_name => "Book", :foreign_key => "parent_book_id"
  belongs_to :parent_book, :class_name => "Book"
end

in your DirectStore config

api: {
    read: App.models.Track.ext_read,
    create: App.models.Track.ext_create,
    update: App.models.Track.ext_update,
    destroy: App.models.Track.ext_destroy
}

if you want to include a linked secondary model :

 baseParams: {
     "include": [
         "author",
         "publisher"
     ]
 }

you would then be able to display a book's author name by seting up a field "author.name" in your record.

Copyright (c) 2010 Le Lag, released under the MIT license