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.

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import com.psddev.cms.db.Content;
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import com.psddev.dari.db.Recordable;
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public class Article extends Content {
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    private String headline;
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    private String body;
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    public String getHeadline() {
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        return headline;
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    }
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    public void setHeadline(String headline) {
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        this.headline = headline;
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    }
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    public String getBody() {
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        return body;
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    }
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    public void setBody(String body) {
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        this.body = body;
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    }
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}

View Model

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

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import com.psddev.cms.view.JsonView;
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import com.psddev.cms.view.PageEntryView;
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import com.psddev.cms.view.ViewInterface;
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import com.psddev.cms.view.ViewModel;
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@JsonView
①
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@ViewInterface
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public class ArticleViewModel extends ViewModel<Article> implements PageEntryView {
②
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    public String getBody() {
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        return model.getBody();
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    }
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    public String getHeadline() {
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        return model.getHeadline();
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    }
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}

• ①Indicates output format for this view model is a JSON representation.
• ②Indicates 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.

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

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