express-mongoose-resource

express-mongoose-resource provides resourceful routing for mongoose models to expressjs.

The library uses and extends express-resource, remaining fully compatible with it.

Note: actually we now use express-resource-middleware, which adds route middleware support, remaining fully backward compatible with the original.

Install

npm install express-mongoose-resource

Usage

As with express-resource, simply require('express-mongoose-resource'), and resourceful routing will be available through the app.resource() method. In addition to the usual express-resource usage and semantics of app.resource(), it's now also possible to simply pass a mongoose model to app.resource(), and a new Resource object will be returned for the given model. For instance, if we have a mongoose Forum model, calling

app.resource({model: Forum});

will estabilish the default express-resource mapping (apart for the new schema action):

GET     /forums/schema       ->  schema
GET     /forums              ->  index
GET     /forums/new          ->  new
POST    /forums              ->  create
GET     /forums/:forum       ->  show
GET     /forums/:forum/edit  ->  edit
PUT     /forums/:forum       ->  update
DELETE  /forums/:forum       ->  destroy

where the :forum parameter is the mongoose ObjectId for the model instance. Note that when model is not specified, app.resource() falls back to the standard express-resource implementation.

The format is determined using express-resource content negotiation, and if not specified it's assumed to be json. All actions are automatically available for the json format.

It's also possible to nest resources:

var ForumSchema = new mongoose.Schema({
  ...
});
var Forum = db.model("Forum", ForumSchema);

var ThreadSchema = new mongoose.Schema({
  forum: { type: mongoose.ObjectId, ref: 'Forum' },
  ...
});
var Thread = db.model("Thread", ThreadSchema);

...

var r_forum = app.resource({model: Forum});
var r_thread = app.resource({model: Thread});

r_forum.add(r_thread, {pivotField: 'forum'});

which will add a Thread resource nested under Forum:

GET     /forums/:forum/threads/schema       ->  schema
GET     /forums/:forum/threads              ->  index
GET     /forums/:forum/threads/new          ->  new
POST    /forums/:forum/threads              ->  create
GET     /forums/:forum/threads/:thread      ->  show
GET     /forums/:forum/threads/:thread/edit ->  edit
PUT     /forums/:forum/threads/:thread      ->  update
DELETE  /forums/:forum/threads/:thread      ->  destroy

Content-Negotiation

The format is determined using express-resource content negotiation, and if not specified it's assumed to be json.

HTML resources

The index, new, show and edit actions also support the html format. In this case, an expressjs template is rendered. For the Forum example above, the templates would be:

• forums/index for the index action
• forums/edit for the new and edit actions
• forums/show for the show action

The context passed to the template contains the following keys:

• view, the view name (index, new, show, edit)
• name, the template name (index, show, edit) (by default, edit is used by new and edit views)
• model, the mongoose model
• schema, the mongoose schema
• modelName, the mongoose model name
• resource_id, the action name
• instance, the mongoose model instance (new, show and edit actions)
• object, a plain JavaScript object corresponding to the mongoose model instance, as returned by mongoose toJSON() (new, show and edit actions)
• instances, the mongoose result set (index action)
• objects, an array of plain JavaScript objects corresponding to the mongoose result set (index action)
• json, the JSON string representation of the model instance (new, show and edit actions) or of the result set (index action)

When using nested resources, the context also contains the pivot field value, name and id. In the example above, the context variable pivot would contain forum, pivot_id would contain the forum id, and forum would contain the serialized forum model.

Bugs and pull requests

Please use the github repository to notify bugs and make pull requests.

License

This software is © 2012-2013 Marco Pantaleoni, released under the MIT licence. Use it, fork it.

See the LICENSE file for details.