modelFactory

A light-weight model layer that bridges the gap between AngularJS and your RESTful APIs.

Why would you use this over other available solutions?

• Lightweight/Simple, the code simply does some basic copy/extending and prototypical instances; no magic required.
• Patterns/Practices, the model definition closely resembles Angular's ngResource meaning its easy to swap out, replace later, eases scaling/transition, and its designed for Angular; not a backbone port!
• Utilizes Angular at the core, it doesn't duplicate things Angular already does. Any action can be passed a $http configuration option, all your interceptors still work, it uses Angular's cache, etc!
• Compliant, URI Template matches the specs.
• Small - 1.45KB gzipped/minified ( excludes depedencies )
• Minimal Dependencies, only use URI template and deep-diff ( this isn't even required ) utility. NO underscore, lodash, jquery, etc!
• Its full of awesome features

See wiki for documentation.

Features

• URI Templates (RFC6570)
• Model instances
• Collections
• Single Datastore
• Caching / Cache invalidation
• Default value population
• Pending / Completed Status
• Relationships
• Object Deep Diff / Reversion
• Track active promises to prevent duplicate sends

Other Solutions

After doing quite a bit of research before writing this, I took a look at other solutions. Here is what I found and why I wrote my own.

• Restmod Very nice solution but very opinionated and hyper-active. 22kb min

• Modelizer Good but requires Lodash. 23kb min

• ModelCore Good but not very well tested and not active.

• angular-watch-resource - Really only handles collections

• angular-restful - Very basic but nice

• ngResource Out of the box model layer, very limited.

• angularjs-rails-resource Too rails-ish.

• angular-nested-resource - Okay API, not loving the nested architecture.

• Aar.js Very light, not sure what value this adds.

• Angular Activerecord A copy of BackboneModel but doesn't really work with Angular patterns.

• Angular-Data Not really a model layer but a data store. Very very heavy ( 67kb min )

• ngActiveResource Very ruby-ish api. Requires lodash. Has validation but thats not needed in angular if you do it right.

• restangular I don't consider this a model layer; it feels moore like a fancy http layer that returns promises because everyone complains about ngResource not doing it. It requires underscore.

• BreezeJS This is a very full featured model/cache/validation etc. Its framework agnostic, which means it follows its own patterns and not angulars. Its very heavy, requires server data massaging, and the API looks like Microsoft Entity Framework.

• ng-backbone Another backbone model clone. This one actually requires backbone and lodash.

Install

Install via bower

bower install angular-model-factory --save

Alternatively you can download/clone the repo and link the files in dist/.

Dependencies

• Angular >= 1.3
• deep-diff
• uri-templates

Development

Prepare your environment

• Install Node.js and NPM (should come with)
• Install global dev dependencies: npm install -g bower grunt-cli
• Install local dev dependencies: npm install && bower install in repository directory

Development Commands

• grunt build to concat and build
• grunt karma for continuous testing mode with karma (useful during development as tests will be run on each change)
• grunt karma:ci for a one-time execution of the tests (used by Travis)

Contributing

• Run the tests
• Create a feature branch
• When issuing a pull request, please exclude changes from the "dist" folder to avoid merge conflicts.

Credits

angular-model-factory is a Swimlane open-source project; we believe in giving back to the open-source community by sharing some of the projects we build for our application. Swimlane is an automated cyber security operations and incident response platform that enables cyber security teams to leverage threat intelligence, speed up incident response and automate security operations.