I am putting together a basic CRUD system for a project, and we've decided to bundle in Backbone.js & CoffeeScript to abstract more of our JavaScript functionality. The learning curve has been pretty steep for me, since I'm not much of a JS pro.
At the moment, I'm just trying to pull a record. Any record. So I've rigged a dummy route to supply a 'products' record set via JSON, to see how it renders, before I go forward.
window.Product = Backbone.Model.extend
initialize: -> console.log this
window.Products = Backbone.Collection.extend
model: Product
initialize: -> console.log this
url: '/dummy'
So, in the console, I type:
product = new Product()
And it seems to render the product just fine. But when I type:
product.fetch()
It returns:
TypeError: Cannot call method 'ajax' of undefined
I tried the same thing with the Collection.
products = new Products()
products.fetch()
TypeError: Cannot call method 'ajax' of undefined
I've made other parts (view renders, etc.) work just fine, but this ajax error is getting at me repeatedly. I've spent hours looking through different documentation (including the official ones, and all the information I could trail to from the wiki), trying out the code in plain JavaScript as well as CoffeeScript, implementing different scopes (with/without window namespacing), etc. There's nothing on Google.
This must be something ridiculously simple that I should probably just know, but I can't figure it out for the life of me. Or it was the one spot of the documentation that I missed. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?
#Ironchamber: In order to use the Ajax method of Backbone, you must also supply a library that provides cross-browser Ajax support. Backbone is optimized to use either jQuery or Zepto. It looks to me from your error message that you're missing one of those.
The other solution is to call this at document ready:
Backbone.setDomLibrary(jQuery);
This way the file include order doesn't matter.
Related
In my application code, there are a lot of calls (like 100+) to the "top object" referring to window.top such as top.$("title") and so forth. Now, I've run into the problem using Cypress to perform end-to-end testing. When trying to log into the application, there are some calls to top.$(...) but the DevTools shows a Uncaught TypeError: top.$ is not a function. This resulted in my team and I discovering that the "top" our application is trying to reach is the Cypress environment itself.
The things I've tried before coming here are:
1) Trying to stub the window.top with the window object referencing our app. This resulted in us being told window.top is a read-only object.
2) Researching if Cypress has some kind of configuration that would smartly redirect calls to top in our code to be the top-most environment within our app. We figured we probably weren't the only ones coming across this issue.
If there were articles, I couldn't find any, so I came to ask if there was a way to do that, or if anyone would know of an alternate solution?
Another solution we considered: Looking into naming window objects so we can reference them by name instead of "window" or "top". If there isn't a way to do what I'm trying to do through Cypress, I think we're willing to do this as a last resort, but hopefully, we don't have to change that, since we're not sure how much of the app it will break upfront.
#Mikkel Not really sure what code I can provide to be useful, but here's the code that causes Cypress to throw the uncaught exception
if (sample_condition) {
top.$('title').text(...).find('content') // Our iframe
} else {
top.$('title').text(page_title)
}
And there are more instances in our code where we access the top object, but they are generally similar. We found out the root cause of the issue is that within Cypress calls to "top" actually interface with Cypress instead of their intended environment which is our app.
This may not be a direct answer to your question, it's just expanding on your request for more information about the technique that I used to pass info from one script to another. I tried to do it within the same script without success - basically because the async nature of .then() stopped it from working.
This snippet is where I read a couple of id's from sessionStorage, and save them to a json file.
//
// At this point the cart is set up, and in sessionStorage
// So we save the details to a fixtures file, which is read
// by another test script (e2e-purchase.js)
//
cy.window().then(window => {
const contents = {
memberId: window.sessionStorage.getItem('memberId'),
cartId: window.sessionStorage.getItem('mycart')
}
cy.writeFile(`tests/cypress/fixtures/cart.json`, contents)
})
In another script, it loads the file as a fixture (fixtures/cart.json) to pull in a couple of id's
cy.fixture(`cart`).then(cart => {
cy.visit(`/${cart.memberId}/${cart.cartId}`)
})
Pretty simple you'd think given the popularity of both, but I am encountering a few hurdles.
I am using scaphold.io to be able to quickly show off a working UI. That is, if Vue can interact with Scaphold.
I have investigated two resources:
https://github.com/kristianmandrup/vue2-apollo-scaphold
Which seems to be a Scaphold production. Tried it. Many, many vague bugs.
Then there is also:
https://github.com/Akryum/vue-apollo
But this is too much. I don't need a server, the server is on Scaphold.
I also tried building the whole thing up by using the tutorial on howtographql, but this one is also outdated.
Ideally I want to instantiate an as up to date Vue 2 app using (I guess) the npm vue-cli, then install only the required apollo (or whatever, but I guess apollo) add-ons that I need. The minimum.
Shouldn't be too hard, I'll figure it out eventually, but some help is more than welcome.
You can consume a graphql api using your favorite regular request module (ajax, fetch, axios). Take the scalphold docs for example, but in the callback do this.vueUserData = body.data.getUser;
instead of
console.log(JSON.stringify(body, null, 2));
(edited to add one gotcha I remembered: if you encounter a problem where the callback doesn't know that this is supposed to be the component, you can do var self = this before the request function, then reference self.vueUserData instead.)
I downloaded Durandal 2.0.1 StarterKit and I am using it for a web project. I worked with it for a while now.
In one of my viewmodels I am using the routing with id in the url: route: 'test/:id'. Since I want to protect against random id inputs from the user, I am using the canAvtivate function, in which I perform some checks.
When I'm trying to access the route from another route the canActivate function is evaluated before activating, but when i just change the id value in the url the function is not called. It happens the same if I say router.navigate("#/test/44"); from within that view.
Is this desired behavior?
This is a bit of a guess as I haven't played much with parameterized routing yet, but perhaps the active module is being reused? Does the section "Module Reuse" at the link below apply in your situation?
http://durandaljs.com/documentation/Using-The-Router/
Perhaps you can work around this by implementing canReuseForRoute
I have a Backbone application, which has a collection called Links. Links maps to a REST API URI of /api/links.
The API will give the user the latest links. However, I have a system in place that will add a job to the message queue when the user hits this API, requesting that the links in the database are updated.
When this job is finished, I would to push the new links to the Backbone collection.
How should I do this? In my mind I have two options:
From the Backbone collection, long poll the API for new links
Setup WebSockets to send a "message" to the collection when the job is done, sending the new data with it
Scrap the REST API for my application and just use WebSockets for everything, as I am likely to have more realtime needs later down the line
WebSockets with the REST API
If I use WebSockets, I'm not sure of the best way to integrate this into my Backbone collection so that it works alongside the REST API.
At the moment my Backbone collection looks like this:
var Links = Backbone.Collection.extend({
url: '/api/links'
});
I'm not sure how to enable the Backbone collection to handle AJAX and WebSockets. Do I continue to use the default Backbone.sync for the CRUD Ajax operations, and then deal with the single WebSocket connection manually? In my mind:
var Links = Backbone.Collection.extend({
url: '/api/links',
initialize: function () {
var socket = io.connect('http://localhost');
socket.on('newLinks', addLinks)
},
addLinks: function (data) {
// Prepend `data` to the collection
};
})
Questions
How should I implement my realtime needs, from the options above or any other ideas you have? Please provide examples of code to give some context.
No worries! Backbone.WS got you covered.
You can init a WebSocket connection like:
var ws = new Bakcbone.WS('ws://exmaple.com/');
And bind a Model to it like:
var model = new Backbone.Model();
ws.bind(model);
Then this model will listen to messages events with the type ws:message and you can call model.send(data) to send data via that connection.
Of course the same goes for Collections.
Backbone.WS also gives some tools for mapping a custom REST-like API to your Models/Collections.
My company has a fully Socket.io based solution using backbone, primarily because we want our app to "update" the gui when changes are made on another users screen in real time.
In a nutshell, it's a can of worms. Socket.IO works well, but it also opens a lot of doors you may not be interested in seeing behind. Backbone events get quite out of whack because they are so tightly tied to the ajax transactions...you're effectively overriding that default behavior. One of our better hiccups has been deletes, because our socket response isn't the model that changed, but the entire collection, for example. Our solution does go a bit further than most, because transactions are via a DDL that is specifically setup to be universal across the many devices we need to be able to communicate with, now and in the future.
If you do go the ioBind path, beware that you'll be using different methods for change events compared to your non-socket traffic (if you mix and match) That's the big drawback of that method, standard things like "change" becomes "update" for example to avoid collisions. It can get really confusing in late-night debug or when you have a new developer join the team. For that reason, I prefer either going sockets, or not, not a combination. Sockets have been good so far, and scary fast.
We use a base function that does the heavy lifting, and have several others that extend this base to give us the transaction functionality we need.
This article gives a great starter for the method we used.
I'm attempting to mock the response of a dojo xhr request, but I haven't found a good solution.
Ideally, I'd like to see a solution similar to the jQuery mockjax plugin where I can set a specific call based on a url, e.g.:
$.mockjax({
url: '/restful/fortune',
responseTime: 750,
responseText: {
status: 'success',
fortune: 'Are you a turtle?'
}
});
My initial thought was to utilize the "/dojo/io/send" channel, but I haven't been able to get a modified response to be loaded after modifying the dojo Deferred object.
The other thought is to use a pass-through method that would determine if an actual xhr request should be made, e.g.:
function xhrRequest(xhrArgs) {
if(shouldMock) {
var fakeReturnJson = dojo.toJson({
howdy: "that's odd!",
isStrange: false
});
return fakeReturnJson;
} else {
dojo.xhr(xhrArgs);
}
}
Can someone tell me the best way to go about mocking dojo xhr calls?
Thanks!
It's an old question, but I think you should do your mocking using Sinon.js
However you will need to put the following:
has: { native-xhr2: false }
into your dojoConfig for it to work in 1.8
I haven't heard of any Dojo specific libraries similar to Mockjax. But what I think you could try is use Mockjax with Dojo. This should be pretty easy to do since all you'll have to do is use JQuery during development only for testing with Mockjax and then remove it once development is complete.
I use your second suggestion. Currently, I have a transport layer (simple js class) and 2 implementations (XhrTransport and MockTransport). I then switch in which I need without changing the widget code.
Widgets call the server with:
Controller.send(aServerCall);
where aServerCall is a simple value object with the server endpoint, params and callback.
This way, you can add nice things to the controller that will apply to all server calls (such as logging, analytics, generic error handling...) and also mock out the entire server when doing unit tests.
For the MockTransport, I simply return canned json data from static .js files in the format that the widget expects.