Adding Application Functionality

In preparation for adding todo lists, let's separate the common element between todos and notes (the title) from the piece that's different (the content)

Setting up the JSON

• First we need to generate a new model for the content attribute

  • rails g model StickyNote content:string
  • Add polymorphic association to the Note Rails model and name it body
  • Next we need to create a migration that creates our new table and creates a new StickyNote for each Note
  • We take advantage of the new reversible method in Rails 4

  • We also use the dir.up and dir.down methods so we only have to use the change method in our migration

    def change
      create_table :sticky_notes do |t|
        t.string :content
    
        t.timestamps
      end
    
      change_table :notes do |t|
        t.belongs_to :body, polymorphic: true
      end
    
      reversible do |dir|
        dir.down { add_column :notes, :content, :string }
    
        Note.reset_column_information
        Note.all.each do |note|
          dir.up { note.body = StickyNote.create(content: note.send(:read_attribute, :content)) }
          dir.down { note.send(:write_attribute, :content, note.body.content) }
          note.save!
        end
    
        dir.up { remove_column :notes, :content }
      end
    end
    

• Add a content method to Note Rails model which delegates to our new polymorphic association body

• To keep our application working we'll need to update our index.html.erb file

  • We need to tell Rails to include the content method when building the json representation of our Note Rails model .to_json(methods: :content)

• We also need to update our seeds file to create a StickyNote for each Note

Handling the association on the client

• We would still like to just have a Note Backbone model, but we need to handle the new API structure

• We need to change the JSON to include the body

  • We do this by adding a parse method to the Backbone Note model

    parse: (data) -> data.content = data.body.content delete data.body delete data.body_type delete data.body_id data

  • Next we need to tell Backbone to call our new parse method

  • When we initialize our ScratchPad app we need to tell the notes collection to call parse new @Collections.Notes(@notesJson, parse: true)

• Commit!