faceted

Faceted provides a set of tools, patterns, and modules for use in API implementations.

It was written and is maintained by Corey Ehmke (@bantik) and Max Thom Stahl (@villainous) at Trunk Club.

Presenters

Let's say that you have an ActiveRecord model called Musician, and you want to expose it through your API using a Presenter pattern. Faceted makes it easy. Create a new class namespaced inside of your API like so:

module MyApi
  class Musician
    include Faceted::Presenter
    presents :musician
    field :name
    field :genre
    field :instrument, :default => 'guitar'
  end
end

That's actually all you have to do. The presents method maps your Musician presenter to a root-level class called Musician, and the field methods map to attributes or methods on the associated AR Musician instance. If a default is set for a field, that default value will be stored when the presenter is used to create a record, unless overridden.

What's that, you say? How is the appropriate AR Musican record associated? Simple. Invoke an instance of the MyApi::Musician passing in an :id parameter, and it just works:

m = Musician.create(:name => 'Johnny Cash', :genre => 'Western')
m.id
=> 13

presenter = MyApi::Musician.new(:id => 13)
presenter.name
=> "Johnny Cash"

You can also invoke methods on AR instances using the same syntax. Let's say that your base Musician class has a random_song_title method that returns one of the musician's popular songs. Simply wire up the method in your presenter:

field :random_song_title

That's it.

presenter.random_song_title
=> "Ring of Fire"

Relationships work almost the same way. If Musician actually has_one birthplace, and includes a birthplace_id attribute, wire it up like this:

field :birthplace_id

Create a presenter for the associated Birthplace model:

module MyApi
  class Birthplace
    include Faceted::Presenter
    presents :birthplace
    field :city
    field :state
  end
end

Now your Musician presenter responds the way it should:

presenter.birthplace.city
=> "Kingsland"

It's smart enough to identify that birthplace_id indicates a relationship and builds the association for you. If you don't want it to do this, simply pass the skip_association flag:

field :record_label_id, :skip_association => true

You can also explicitly declare the class of the association:

field :genre_id, :class_name => 'MusicalGenre'

Presenters from Existing Models

In your controllers, you will typically be using one of three methods to instantiate a presenter: new, materialize, or from.

new

This method is used to retrieve and instantiate a persisted model based on an id:

m = Musician.create(:name => 'Bauhaus', :genre => 'Goth')   m.id
=> 213

presenter = MyApi::Musician.new(:id => 213)
presenter.name
=> "Bauhaus"

materialize

Have an array of objects that you need translated into presenters? No problem. Use the materialize class method on the presenter class:

    musicians = [
        ::Musician.new(:name => 'Love and Rockets'),
        ::Musician.new(:name => 'The Pixies')
    ]
    presenters = MyApi::Musician.materialize(musicians)
    presenters.first.name
    => 'Love and Rockets'

from

If you have an single instance of a persisted model already loaded, or if you're presenting a class that does not get read from a database (e.g. an object from an API response), you can use the from class method to materialize a single presenter object:

    musician_from_json_response = ::Musician.new(:name => 'Dust and a Shadow')
    presenter = MyApi::Musician.from(musician_from_json_response)
    presenter.name
    => 'Dust and a Shadow'

Collectors

Collectors are simply models that collect multiple instances of another model. An example:

module MyApi
  class Playlist
    include Faceted::Collector
    collects :musicians, :find_by => :genre_id
    collects :deejays #implicit find_by, using 'playlist_id'
  end
end

l = MyApi::Playlist.new(:genre_id => 3)
l.musicians.count
=> 14

l.musicians.first.name
=> "American Music Club"

Controllers

Wiring up your controllers is easy. Start with your base controller:

class MyApi::BaseController < ActionController::Base

  require 'faceted'
  include Faceted::Controller
  before_filter :authenticate_user!
  respond_to :json
  rescue_from Exception, :with => :render_500
  rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, :with => :render_404

end

Then create the controllers for your API-specific models:

class MyApi::MusiciansController < MyApi::BaseController

  def show
    @musician = MyApi::Musician.new(params)
    render_response @musician
  end

  def update
    @musician = MyApi::Musician.new(params)
    @musician.save
    render_response @musician
  end

end

Contributing to faceted

Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet.
Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it.
Fork the project.
Start a feature/bugfix branch.
Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution.
Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.