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Headless

In a headless Brightspot implementation, the view system delivers content via a JSON API to a consuming application; that application processes and transforms the content using its own logic. In headless Brightspot implementations, two scenarios are common:

  • Delivering APIs to mobile applications
  • Delivering APIs to JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, or others)

Producing your JSON API requires two steps:

  1. Create a model
  2. Create a view model

The following sections provide examples for each of those steps.

Model​

The following snippet is a basic model for an article.

import com.psddev.cms.db.Content;
import com.psddev.dari.db.Recordable;

public class Article extends Content {

    private String headline;

    private String body;

    public String getHeadline() {
        return headline;
    }

    public void setHeadline(String headline) {
        this.headline = headline;
    }

    public String getBody() {
        return body;
    }

    public void setBody(String body) {
        this.body = body;
    }
}

View Model​

The following snippet is a headless view model that serializes a model’s data into JSON format.

import com.psddev.cms.view.JsonView;
import com.psddev.cms.view.PageEntryView;
import com.psddev.cms.view.ViewInterface;
import com.psddev.cms.view.ViewModel;

@JsonView
@ViewInterface
public class ArticleViewModel extends ViewModel<Article> implements PageEntryView {

    public String getBody() {
        return model.getBody();
    }

    public String getHeadline() {
        return model.getHeadline();
    }
}
  • 6. Indicates output format for this view model is a JSON representation.
  • 8. Indicates the source model is Article.

At run time, Brightspot manages the interaction between the model and view model to produce the JSON file containing field names and associated values.

{
  "headline" : "JSON Example",
  "body" : "Brightspot automatically produces JSON from the view model."
}

The consuming application has the responsibility of processing the JSON output for downstream purposes.