9.4.3 Defining entities

9.4.3.1 General structure

The JSON entities are defined by creating one subdirectory per kind of entity in the src/main/kauri/mockdata directory.

The listing below shows the directory structure of a module containing three types of entities: contacts, tasks and projects.

Within these directories, you create one JSON file per entity instance. The name of the file (without .json extension) is the ID of the entity.

.
|-- contact-module
|   `-- src
|       `-- main
|           `-- kauri
|               |-- mockdata
|                   `-- contacts
|                       `-- 1.json
|                       `-- 2.json
|                       `-- 3.json
|                   `-- tasks
|                       `-- 1.json
|                       `-- 12.json
|                       `-- 13.json
|                   `-- projects
|                       `-- 1.json
|                       `-- 2.json
|                       `-- 3.json

9.4.3.2 JSON entities

Here is an example of a project entity that contains a label, description, start, finish, type, status, importance and a set of subtasks:

{
    label: "Defining prototype module requirements",
    description: "Investigating which requirements we have towards prototyping a Kauri project",
    start: "2008-09-01",
    finish: "2008-09-30",
    type: "research",
    status: "busy",
    importance: "+++",
    subtasks: [
        {label: "Explore", description: "run the kauri samples, make it work!"},
        {label: "Try a prototype", description: "hands on, try to make a prototype"}
    ]
}

9.4.3.3 Linking between entities

In the example above, we could imagine that the subtasks are also entities itself, which we want to CRUD by themselves. Then we would like to create a reference to these entities instead of repeating them. This can be accomplished by linking entities using objects with a  $ref property. If the name of the name-value pair in a JSON object is '$ref' then the value is a reference to another entity.

9.4.3.3.1 Example

{
    "label": "Defining prototype module requirements",
    "description": "Investigating which requirements we have towards prototyping a Kauri project",
    "start": "2008-09-01",
    "finish": "2008-09-30",
    "type": "research",
    "status": "busy",
    "importance": "+++",
    "subtasks": [
        {$ref: "/tasks/3"},
        {$ref: "/tasks/3"}
    ]
}

Of course in this case we have to have a file /entities/tasks/3.json:

{
    "label": "Explore", 
    "description": "run the kauri samples, make it work!"
}

When GETting the project entity, the entities linked via $ref will be merged within the project JSON.