loopback/node_modules/asteroid-module

asteroid-module

v0.0.1

About

Asteroid applications are a combination of regular Node.js modules and Asteroid modules. Asteroid modules may be initialized using JavaScript or by writing config files.

Using Asteroid Modules

There are two distinct ways to use an Asteroid Module in your application.

App API

The app API allows you to define data sources and models in regular Node JavaScript. See the docs for more info.

Config Files

You may also define data sources, models and other asteroid modules by writing config.json files. See the documentation for a given module to see what config data it requires.

Extending Asteroid

The core of asteroid is very lightweight and unopionated. All features are added on as AsteroidModules. This means you can add your own functionality, modify existing functionality, or extend existing functionality by creating your own AsteroidModule class.

An AsteroidModule is an abstract class that provides a base for all asteroid modules. Its constructor takes an options argument provided by a config.json. It is also supplied with dependencies it lists on its constructor based on information in the config.json file.

See model for an example.

AsteroidModule.dependencies

An asteroid module may define dependencies on other modules that can be configured in config.json. Eg. the collection module defines a model dependency.

Collection.dependencies = {
  model: 'model'
}

A configuration then must define:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "model": "some-model-module"
  }
}

Where some-model-module is an existing model instance.

AsteroidModule.options

Asteroid Modules may also describe the options they accept. This will validate the configuration and make sure users have supplied required information and in a way that the module can use to construct a working instance.

Here is an example options description for the oracle database connection module.

OracleConnection.options = {
  'hostname': {type: 'string', required: true},
  'port': {type: 'number', min: 10, max: 99999},
  'username': {type: 'string'},
  'password': {type: 'string'}
};

key the option name given in config.json.

type must be one of:

• string
• boolean
• number
• array

min/max depend on the type

{
  min: 10, // minimum length or value
  max: 100, // max length or value
}