How to present sort order-by query in Falcor? - falcor

Question

Suppose the model is structured as
{
events: [
{
date: '2016-06-01',
name: 'Children Day'
},
{
date: '2016-01-01',
name: 'New Year Day'
},
{
date: '2016-12-25',
name: 'Christmass'
}
]
}
There could be a lot of events in our storage. From client side, we want to issue a query to get 10 events order by date in ascending order.
How to present this kind of query in Falcor?

Answer 1

Heres what I would do: first, promote your events to entities, i.e. give them ids:
id | date | name
1 | 2016-06-01 | Children Day
2 | 2016-01-01 | New Year Day
3 | 2016-12-25 | Christmass
Then provide a route providing these events by id:
route: 'eventsById[{integers:ids}]["date","name"]'
which returns the original data. Now you can create a new route for orderings
route: 'orderedEvents['date','name']['asc','desc'][{ranges:range}]
which returns references into the eventsById route. This way your client could even request the same data sorted in different ways within the same request!
router.get(
"orderedEvents.date.asc[0..2]",
"orderedEvents.date.desc[0..2]");
which would return
{
'eventsById': {
1: {
'date':'2016-06-01',
'name':'Children Day' },
2: {
'date':'2016-01-01',
'name':'New Year Day' },
3: {
'date':'2016-12-25',
'name':'Christmass' } },
'orderedEvents': {
'date': {
'asc': [
{ '$type':'ref', 'value':['eventsById',2] },
{ '$type':'ref', 'value':['eventsById',1] },
{ '$type':'ref', 'value':['eventsById',3] } ],
'desc': [
{ '$type':'ref', 'value':['eventsById',3] },
{ '$type':'ref', 'value':['eventsById',1] },
{ '$type':'ref', 'value':['eventsById',2] } ] } }
}