Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Core Implementations of Data APIs

The previous section provided a summary of the four primary data APIs available at this time. This section works through the two implementations provided by Core—the ItemFileReadStore and ItemFileWriteStore. As you'll see, the ItemFileReadStore implements the Read and Identity APIs, and the ItemFileWriteStore implements all four APIs discussed. A good understanding of these two stores equips you with enough familiarity to augment these existing stores to suit your own needs—or to implement your own.

Tip

Although not explicitly discussed in this book, the dojox.data subproject contains a powerful assortment of dojo.data implementations for common tasks such as interfacing to CSV stores, Flickr, XML, OPML, Picasa, and other handy stores. Since they all follow the same APIs as you're learning about here, picking them up should be a snap.

ItemFileReadStore

Although it is quite likely that your particular situation may benefit from a custom implementation of dojo.data.api.Read to maximize efficiency and impedance mismatching, the toolkit does include the ItemFileReadStore, which implements the Read and Identity interfaces and consumes a flexible JSON representation. For situations in which you need to quickly get something up and running, you need to do little more than have your application's business logic output data in the format that the ItemFileReadStore expects, and voilà, you may use the store as needed.

Tip

One thing to know up front is that the ...