OpaDo Data Storage

OpaDo (a port of the TodoMVC app to Opa) now persists todo items to the Opa database. The new version is up on dotcloud, http://opado-tristan.sloughter.dotcloud.com/

I’ve added a todo_item type which stores the item’s value and two other attributes we won’t use until the next post when we have user accounts for their own todo_item stores.

To tell Opa where to store the records we’ll create, we provide a path to the Opa db function and set its type. For our todo items we use a stringmap since currently the id’s are randomly generated strings (I know, I know, but its just an example!). We can then reference a record in the database with the path /todo_item[some_id_string].

Now we can insert todo_item’s to this db path as so:

For now user_id and created_at are empty, but I’ll be updating that when I add user accounts.

Since we are storing each item, we need to populate the list on page load with whats already stored:

The first line of the function sets the variable items to all the todo_item records in the database. We use StringMap.iter to take each todo_item and add it to the page. The first argument to the anonymous function is the id the item is stored in the database with (the id we will use in the HTML as well) and the second is the actual todo_item, so we take its value field and pass that to the add_todo_to_page function along with the id.

To have the add_todos function when the list element is ready we add an on_ready attribute that will call add_todos:

Lastly, we want to be able to delete a todo_item from the database:

The main piece to notice here is @/todo_items[id] in Db.remove(). The @ is saying that we are passing the path itself to remove() and not the value at that path.

Nice and easy! No database to setup or deploy, just Opa. Next time we’ll add user accounts, so we don’t have to all share the same todo list.