ink-collector

Part of the ink tool suite

ink-collector is a collection manager. Given an array or hash table (an object where each key represents a record), you can query and manipulat the results in a number of different ways. For instance, if you have a collection that contains records that look like this:

{
	name: {
		first: "Gloria",
		name: "Swanson"
	},
	work: {
		company: "ABC Deliveries",
		city: "Philadelphia"
	},
	purchases: 389.75
}

When you collect it using ink-collector you can do some neat things

var collector = require("ink-collector")
// get data from somewhere
var people = collector.collect( myCollection );

// find all people with a last name of Swanson:
var swansons = people.find({"name.last": "swanson"});

// all Swansons in Chicago
var chigSwansons = people.find({"name.last": "swanson", "work.city": "Chicago"});

// all Swansons in Chicago with purchases greater than 1000
var chigSwansons = people.find({"name.last": "swanson", "work.city": "Chicago", "purchases": {$gt:1000}});

As you can see, the query language is the Mongo query language - indeed, it supports pretty nice subset of Mongo's language along with dot notation to support reaching into objects.

It also supports a number of useful methods from the underscore/lodash world:

people.each(function(row, key)){
	console.info(row.name.first);
});

// OK, nice. But what if I only want to iterate the Swansons of the world?
people.each({"name.last": "swanson"}, function(row, key)){
    console.info( row.name.first );
});

// group only the members of company ABC by city
var groupings = people.groupBy( {"work.company" : "ABC"}, function ( row ) {
    return row.work.city;
} );

// count by? you betcha
var countBy = people.countBy( {"work.company" : "ABC"}, function ( row ) {
    return row.work.city;
} );

And all the goodness you would expect like max, min, map, reduce and others. See the documentation for full juicy details.

Usage

From node: var strings = require("ink-collector");

On the web: Copy dist/ink.collector.js or dist/ink.collector.min.js to your assets directory and then load it directly

<script src="js/ink.collector.js"></script>
<script>
	// all of the methods hang right off of window.ink.collector
    var people = ink.collector.collect( myCollection );
</script>

The collector supports arrays and objects. It provides three methods to get you on your way. It manages arrays and objects slightly differently since some actions only make sense on an array. Most of the time you will want to use collect

var hookMeUp = collector.collect(someCollection);

If you don't pass a collection to collect it will default to an object collector. If you pass a value, it interrogates the value and returns an array or object collector as appropriate. If you need more control, you can call:

// creates an array collector
var myCollection = collector.array();
// creates an array collector
var myCollection = collector.object();

What you actually receive is an instance of either ACollector or OCollector, however these classes are not exposed directly - you can't instantiate these classes directly. That may change in a future release, but for now consider this module a factory that returns product instances without revealing the implementation details.

Contributing

Yes! Contribute. Make sure your code looks essentially like the code you see. Document using JSDoc tags.

Make sure you have grunt-cli installed globally. To test, you will also need nodeunit installed globally. To test:

nodeunit tests/

ink tools

Also see

• ink-probe
• ink-strings
• [ink-collector] (https://github.com/terryweiss/ink-collector)
• ink-scene (coming soon)
• ink-dox (coming, but a long way off yet)

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.