Introduction

In the first part of the Blog tutorial, you will learn:

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You will need to create a new project for this tutorial. In Eclipse, open the File menu, select New and select Wonder REST Application (or ERRest Application, according to your WOLips version). Name your project as BlogRest.

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The model should show up in a window that looks like this:

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If it didn't show up, the window might have opened behind the main Eclipse window. If that's the case, open the Window menu and select the windows that have Entity Modeler in its name.

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. When the database will be created, it will be stored in your home directory (/Users/youruser/ on OS X).

Now, right-click on BlogModel and select New Entity.

Type the following details in the Basic tab:

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You can also specify an absolute path where to store in you h2 database files. For example on Windows OS URL field can be like this:

jdbc:h2:C:/Users/ ... /BlogTutorial

Notice, in the path, *nix like file separator "/" instead of Windows like "\" (as you can read here).

Now, right-click on BlogModel and select New Entity.

Type the following details in the Basic tab:

• Name: BlogEntry
• Table Name: BlogEntry
• Class Name: your.app.model.BlogEntry

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If you did everything well, the list of attributes should look like this:

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You will notice that the attributes have a column with a lock in it. When a lock is present, it will use the value of that attribute for UPDATE ... WHERE attribute = '' statement. This is to do optimistic locking, aka to prevent data conflict when the data object was modified by two different users. Using timestamps for optimistic locking is not a good idea because for certain RDBMS, the value can be different because of milliseconds, so remove the locks on the lastModified and creationDate attributes attribute. The final list should look like this:

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Next step is to create the Author entity. Create a new entity with Author at its name (and also as the table name), and for the class name, use your.app.model.Author. The attributes for this entity are:

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Final list of attributes should look like this:

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Now, it's time to link the two entities together. A An Author can have multiple blog entries, and a BlogEntry can only have one author. To create the relationship (the join), right-click on Author and select New Relationship. On your right, select BlogEntry in the list. On your left, select to many BlogEntries, and on your leftright, select to one Author. Now, in BlogEntry, we need to store the primary key of the author so that we can make the join. The relationship builder allow us to add that attribute, so make sure and a new foreign key named is checked (it is checked by default). The Create Relationship pane should look like this:

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If you check in the Outline tab, you should see that Author now have a blogEntries relationship, and BlogEntry have a author relationship.

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You are now ready to save the model. Save it (File -> Save) and close the Entity Modeler window. If you open the Sources in the main Eclipse window, you will notice that the Sources folder contains a package named your.app.model.notice that the Sources folder contains a package named your.app.model. (If this folder doesn't appear, you may need to set your preferences to automatically generate these source files; see the second suggestion on http://wiki.wocommunity.org/display/documentation/Useful+Eclipse+or+WOLips+Preferences.)

That package have four Java classes: _Author, Author, _BlogEntry and BlogEntry. Those classes were generated by Veogen, a templating engine build on Velocity. The two classes that starts with a underscore are recreated every time you change the EOModel, so if you want to change something in those classes, you need to change the template (no need for that right now). But you can change freely the two classes that don't have the underscore, and this is what we will be doing.

What we are going to do is to write a simple method that returns the full name of an author, e.g. a method that simply concatenate the first name, a space and the last name of the author. To do so, double-click on Author.java and add the following methods:

public String fullName() {
	  return this.firstName() + " " + this.lastName();
	}

Nothing fancy here. Now open BlogEntry.java and add the following method:

	@Override
	public void awakeFromInsertion(EOEditingContext editingContext) {
		  super.awakeFromInsertion(editingContext);
		NSTimestamp  this.setCreationDate(new NSTimestamp()now = new NSTimestamp();
		setCreationDate(now);
		setLastModified(now);
	}

Why are we adding this? awakeFromInsertion is a very good way of setting default values when creating a new instance of a Enterprise Object (EO). In this case, we want to set automatically the creation date and last modification dates without having the user to add that valuethose values.

Now, let's use migrations to actually create the database.

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Migrations allow you to create the tables and columns (and some types of constraint). Entity Modeler have has support to generate the code for the first migration, which is called "migration 0". To do that, open the EOModel (BlogModel EOModel in the Resources folder), right-click on the model name and select Generate Migration.

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Remove the pound char in front of those two properties:

#er.migration.migrateAtStartup=true
#er.migration.createTablesIfNecessary=true

After removing the pound char, the two properties should look like this:

er.migration.migrateAtStartup=true
er.migration.createTablesIfNecessary=true

You are now ready to start the application so that it creates the database! To do so, right-click on Application.java (in the your.app folder) and select Run As -> WOApplication. In Eclipse's Console tab, you should see some output, including something similar to:

BlogRest[62990] INFO  er.extensions.migration.ERXMigrator  - Upgrading BlogModel to version 0 with migration 'your.app.model.migrations.BlogModel0@4743bf3d'
BlogRest[62990] INFO  er.extensions.jdbc.ERXJDBCUtilities  - Executing CREATE TABLE Author(email VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL, firstName VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, id INTEGER NOT NULL, lastName VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL)
BlogRest[62990] INFO  er.extensions.jdbc.ERXJDBCUtilities  - Executing ALTER TABLE Author ADD PRIMARY KEY (id)
BlogRest[62990] INFO  er.extensions.jdbc.ERXJDBCUtilities  - Executing CREATE TABLE BlogEntry(authorID INTEGER NOT NULL, content TIMESTAMP NOT NULL, creationDate TIMESTAMP NOT NULL, id INTEGER NOT NULL, title VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL)
BlogRest[62990] INFO  er.extensions.jdbc.ERXJDBCUtilities  - Executing ALTER TABLE BlogEntry ADD PRIMARY KEY (id)
BlogRest[62990] INFO  er.extensions.jdbc.ERXJDBCUtilities  - Executing ALTER TABLE BlogEntry ADD CONSTRAINT "FOREIGN_KEY_BLOGENTRY_AUTHORID_AUTHOR_ID" FOREIGN KEY (authorID) REFERENCES Author (id)
BlogRest[62990] DEBUG NSLog  -  evaluateExpression: <er.h2.jdbcadaptor.ERH2PlugIn$H2Expression: "UPDATE _dbupdater SET version = ? WHERE modelname = ?" withBindings: 1:0(version), 2:"BlogModel"(modelName)>

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For this tutorial, we will implement the createAction and showAction indexAction methods. But first, we need to create a key filter. A key filter will... filter the input and the output of REST request so that you don't have to send all attributes for a blog entry. For example, we want to show the details for an author, but we don't want to show the password for the author (in real-life, the password would be encrypted)!

Add this method in BlogEntryController:

protected ERXKeyFilter filter() {
    ERXKeyFilter personFilter = ERXKeyFilter.filterWithAttributes();
    personFilter.setAnonymousUpdateEnabled(true);

    ERXKeyFilter filter = ERXKeyFilter.filterWithAttributes();
    filter.include(BlogEntry.AUTHOR, personFilter);
    filter.setUnknownKeyIgnored(true);

    return filter;
  }

Now, let's implement the creationAction createAction method:

public WOActionResults createAction() throws Throwable {
    BlogEntry entry = create(filter());
    editingContext().saveChanges();
    return response(entry, filter());
  }

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Last step in the controller: implementing the showAction indexAction method. Again, the code is simple:

public WOActionResults indexAction() throws Throwable {
    NSArray<BlogEntry> entries = BlogEntry.fetchAllBlogEntries(editingContext());
    return response(entries, filter());
  }

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A route in ERRest is simply a way to define the URL for the entities and to specify which controller the route should use. When your controller extends from ERXDefaultRouteController, it's easy to register a controller and a route. In Application.java, in the Application constructor, add the following code:

ERXRouteRequestHandler restRequestHandler = new ERXRouteRequestHandler();
    restRequestHandler.addDefaultRoutes(BlogEntry.ENTITY_NAME);
    ERXRouteRequestHandler.register(restRequestHandler);
    setDefaultRequestHandler(restRequestHandler);

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We are now reading to add and list blog postings! Start the application and take notice of the URL. It should be something like _http://yourip:someport/cgi-bin/WebObjects/BlogRest.woa_

Adding posts and authors with curl

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The response should look this:

HTTP/1.0 201 Apple WebObjects
Content-Length: 249
x-webobjects-loadaverage: 0
Content-Type: application/json

{"id":1,"type":"BlogEntry","content":"Some text","creationDate":"2011-12-27T21:59:08Z","title":"First post","author":{"id":1,"type":"Author","email":"probert@macti.ca","firstName":"Pascal","lastName":"Robert"}}

To get a list of blog entries:

curl -X GET http://192.168.0.102:52406/cgi-bin/WebObjects/BlogRest.woa/ra/blogEntries.json

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Now, let's build a HTML view for blog posts (you don't want your readers to get your posts by JSON, right?). Again, we will use convention to make it work easily. Open up BlogEntryController and add the following method:

@Override
  protected boolean isAutomaticHtmlRoutingEnabled() {
    return true;
  }

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The next step to get it to work is to make BlogEntryIndexPage to implements implement the er.rest.routes.IERXRouteComponent interface.

import er.rest.routes.IERXRouteComponent;

public class BlogEntryIndexPage extends WOComponent implements IERXRouteComponent {

So now, the automatic HTML routing will send the request for ra/blogEntries.html to the BlogEntryIndexPage component. But we don't have any content in this component, so let's make a method to fetch all blog entries per creation date in descending order. So in BlogEntryIndexPage.java, add the following method:

public NSArray<BlogEntry> entries() {
      EOEditingContext ec = ERXEC.newEditingContext();
      return BlogEntry.fetchAllBlogEntries(ec, BlogEntry.CREATION_DATE.descs());
    }

We need to use that method in a WORepetition, and for that loop, we need a BlogEntry variable to iterate in the list, so add the following code to BlogEntryIndexPage.java:

private BlogEntry entryItem;

    public BlogEntry entryItem() {
      return entryItem;
    }

    public void setEntryItem(BlogEntry entryItem) {
      this.entryItem = entryItem;
    }

The Java part is done, so let's add the loop inside the component. Open BlogEntryIndexPage.wo (it's located in the Component folder) and right after the <body> tag, add:

<wo:loop list="$entries" item="$entryItem">
      <p><wo:str value="$entryItem.title" /></p>
      <p><wo:str value="$entryItem.author.fullName" /></p>
    </wo:loop>

That component code will loop over the blog entries and display the title of the entry + the name of the author. Save everything and run the application.

If you go to http://192.168.0.102:52406/cgi-bin/WebObjects/BlogRest.woa/ra/blogEntries.html^{Image Removed}, you will see the list of blog entries!

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Open BlogEntryShowPage.java and make sure the class extends from implements er.rest.routes.IERXRouteComponent.

import er.rest.routes.IERXRouteComponent;

public class BlogEntryShowPage extends WOComponent implements IERXRouteComponent {

We need to add other methods to receive the BlogEntry object from the controller. In BlogEntryShowPage.java, add:

    private BlogEntry blogEntry;
    
    @ERXRouteParameter
    public void setBlogEntry(BlogEntry blogEntryFromController) {
      this.blogEntry = blogEntryFromController;
    }
    
    public BlogEntry blogEntry() {
      return this.blogEntry;
    }

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The Java part of the work is done, so save the Java class. It's time to work on the component part. Open BlogEntryShowPage.wo and between the <body></body> part, add:

    <h1><wo:str value="$blogEntry.title" /></h1>
    <p><wo:str value="$blogEntry.content" /></p>
    <p>Created on: <wo:str value="$blogEntry.creationDate" dateformat="%Y/%m/%d" /></p>
    <p>Added by: <wo:str value="$blogEntry.author.fullName" /></p>

Our view component is done, the only thing remaining is a link for the blog entry list (BlogEntryIndexPage) to the view page (BlogEntryShowPage). Save BlogEntryShowPage.wo and open BlogEntryIndexPage.wo. We are going to add a link on the title, you will replace to replace this:

<p><wo:str value="$entryItem.title" /></p>

with:

<p><wo:ERXRouteLink entityName="BlogEntry" record="$entryItem" action="show"><wo:str value="$entryItem.title" /></wo:ERXRouteLink></p>

Save the component and run the app. Go to http://192.168.0.102:52406/cgi-bin/WebObjects/BlogRest.woa/ra/blogEntries.html^{Image Removed} to get the list of posts, and you should see a link on the title. Click on it, and now you get the full details of the blog entry!

The REST part of this tutorial is now complete, you can now switch move to the next part of the tutorial.