Nested Entities in JsonResultsAdapter - breeze

Question

I am trying to connect to a third party service using Breeze with a custom JsonResultsAdapter.
The third party service has the "metadata" related to an entity in the root node of the array, then the variables are in a "data" property on the "metadata" object.
The format has two ways of defining relationships. One is via a "#ref" field which references the id of another entity. The other is by having the related object defined inline (instead of the "#ref") which does not have an explicit id, but which is only ever referenced by the "parent" object.
The data looks like:
[{
"id" : "abc",
"type" : "foo",
"data": { "relationshipRef" : { "#ref" : "someid" } }
},
{
"id": "someid",
"type" : "bar",
"data" : { "relationshipInline" : { "type" : "baz",
"data" : { "something" : "whatever",
"innerRelation" : { "#ref" : "abc"}
}
}
}]
I'm currently (in JsonResultsAdapter's visitNode function) moving the properties in the "data" object up into the "root" node, and then replacing any object with an "#ref" property with the value of the "#ref" key and appending an ID to the end (so that relationships can use the original name in the EntityType). IE, the first object would become:
{
"id" : "abc",
"type" : "foo",
"relationshipRefID" : "someid"
}
This works for top level entities and relationships, but I'm having problems with the nested ones.
How would you approach solving this problem?
I was going to use ComplexTypes but the documentation mentioned that they cannot have "navigationProperties" (relationships), which as you can see above is required (the "innerRelation" property).
In some cases, the entities can be nested down to 3 levels or so.
Here is my current visitNode function:
visitNode: function(node, parseContext, nodeContext) {
if(node instanceof Object && node.type != null) {
if(node.deleted) {
//TODO: make sure the object is removed from the manager
return {ignore:true};
}
//We need to tweak the data structure to fit what breeze expects.
//It expects properties to be in the same level as the "metadata" for an object ("type" etc),
//So we need to move the properties from the data object into the node, and fix up relationships.
if(parseContext.entityManager.metadataStore.getEntityType(node.type, true) != null) {
var data = node.data;
for(var key in data) {
var prop = data[key];
//Move any foreign key fields to be "relationID":id instead of "relation":{"#ref":id}
if(prop instanceof Object) {
var ref = prop["#ref"];
if(ref != null) {
node[key+"ID"] = ref
data[key] = null;
continue;
}
}
//TODO: Handle inline references <- This is where I need help!
node[key] = data[key];
}
return {
entityType: node.type,
nodeId: node.id
}
}
else {
return {ignore:true};
}
}
}

Answer 1

Well, apparently I should have tested more before asking here.
It turns out that this works automatically based on the navigationProperties defined in the model! Awesome. I did have to generate ids for the inner nodes that did not have them, but that was simple.