Jed Watson JedWatson

Creating new Field Types for KeystoneJS

We're currently working on making it easier to add new field types to KeystoneJS as plugins.

In the meantime, if you'd like to work on your own field type, hopefully this guide will point you in the right direction.

Keystone fields require the following:

a {fieldType}.js file in ./lib/fieldTypes that controls the field and encapsulates options support, underscore functions, validation and updating
the {fieldType}.js file needs to be included by ./lib/fieldTypes/index.js

I've developed a useful feature in KeystoneJS that lets you populate a relationship from either side, while only storing the data on one side, and am looking for feedback on whether it is something that could / should be brought back into mongoose itself. (It might be possible to add as a separate package but I suspect there'd be too much rewriting of mongoose internals for that to be a good idea).

I've added this as an issue in mongoose for consideration: #1888 but am leaving this gist in place because the examples are easier to read.

I've used Posts and Categories as a basic, contrived example to demonstrate what I'm talking about here; in reality you'd rarely load all the posts for a category but there are other real world cases where it's less unreasonable you'd want to do this, and Posts + Categories is an easy way to demo it.

The problem

The built-in population feature is really useful; not just for

This is an example of how to scaffold API endpoints to list / get / create / update / delete Posts in a Keystone website.

It's a modification of the default project created with the yo keystone generator (see https://github.com/JedWatson/generator-keystone)

Gists don't let you specify full paths, so in the project structure the files would be:

routes-index.js        -->    /routes/index.js         // modified to add the api endpoints
routes-api-posts.js    -->    /routes/api/posts.js     // new file containing the Post API route controllers

Populating Data in KeystoneJS

Keystone's createItems function is a simple but powerful way to populate your database with data.

It can be used to create test fixtures or initialise your database with default content / users / etc.

There's also a shorthand syntax that can be used within update files; if you are using the auto updates feature, any file that exports a create object will automatically be wrapped and the data will be created.

createItems takes two passes at the data it is passed, first creating the items and retaining references by key (if provided) that can be used to populate relationships in the second pass. This makes it easy to create related data without asynchronous nesting (which for data creation sometimes ends up in knots).

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

I am JedWatson on github.
I am jedwatson (https://keybase.io/jedwatson) on keybase.
I have a public key whose fingerprint is 75DB 2419 8E41 BF37 4E39 88F9 5D4F 4D18 EF37 8B10

To claim this, I am signing this object:

	var doQuery = function() {

	// passing an object to async.parallel will cause it to collect their results
	// and provide them to the callback in an object with the same keys.

	async.parallel({
	// functions are passed a callback with the standard argument pattern of fn(err, result)
	count: count.exec,
	query: query.exec
	}, function(err, results) {

	// This function takes a contents object with a files array.
	// The goal is to cache each file details in redis then replace
	// the file's path with a secure, obscured url.

	// Finally the contents object is returned with the updated array
	// in place of the old one.

	// async = require('async')
	// uuid = require('node-uuid')
	// redis.client = require('node-redis').createClient()

	var transform = function(contents, doneTransform) {

	var authExpiry = 60 * 60 * 1000,
	authId = uuid.v4(),
	authKey = 'file:auth:' + authId;

	redis.client.set(authKey, JSON.stringify({
	userId: req.user.id
	}));
	redis.client.expire(authKey, authExpiry);

	// Simulate config options from your production environment by
	// customising the .env file in your project's root folder.
	require('dotenv')().load();

	// Require keystone and i18n
	var keystone = require('keystone'),
	i18n= require('i18n');

	// Initialise Keystone with your project's configuration.
	// See http://keystonejs.com/guide/config for available options

	// A global file to provide the countries and cities

	exports.countries = [{
	name: 'Australia',
	cities: ['Melbourne', 'Sydney', 'Canberra']
	}, {
	name: 'España',
	cities: ['Madrid', 'Barcelona', 'Sevilla']
	}, {
	name: 'Italia',