Some experiments and thoughts on all things from Mitchell Simoens

rootProperty as a function!

3 min read

When I design an endpoint to return some JSON data for consumption in a grid, I always nest the data in the data property so that I can provide a total count in order to support pagination. So most of my server side scripts are setup to nest data. Something like this:

{
    "success": true,
    "total": 4375,
    "data": [...]
}

I setup my store to read this via something like this:

Ext.define('MyApp.view.Foo', {
    extend : 'Ext.data.Store',

    proxy : {
        type   : 'ajax',
        url    : '/foo',
        reader : {
            rootProperty : 'data'
        }
    }
});

However, when using Ext.data.TreeStore, it wants to use the same property to find the children of nodes. By default, it uses the children property and you can change this by using the rootProperty like we have above (there are a couple different ways really). So if you have your nodes nested within the data property but still use children to have your child nodes in, it won't find any child nodes because you have two different roots, data and children.

So how can we handle this use case? Well, first I'd say fix your server to not nest the data so that things will work great within Ext JS. But let's be real for a second, the people in charge of your server-side code are likely a bit reluctant to change. You can buy them a steak dinner and they may still not change, you just have to deal with it.

Don't worry, Ext JS actually has a way to handle this. If you look at the documentation for the rootProperty config it says that it accepts a string for a value. Well, that's not entirely true and the docs will get fixed to reflect this but the rootProperty can actually accept a function and you return child nodes from the data provided. Let's look at some sample data:

{
    "data" : [
        {
            "text"     : "Foo",
            "expanded" : true,
            "children" : [
                {
                    "text" : "Bar",
                    "leaf" : true
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

So we have our child nodes nested within the data property but we also use children to denote our child nodes. We can define out rootProperty to work with this like:

rootProperty : function(node) {
    return node.data || node.children;
}

With this it returns node.data if it's truthy or it will return node.children. So if data exists, return it, else return children. It's as easy as that! Here's a live fiddle:

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Written by Mitchell Simoens who is a long time nerd developing software and building computers and gadgets. Anything expressed on this website are Mitchell Simoens's alone and do not represent his employer.
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