Myriad.js

 

With Myriad it is possible to mimic the behaviour of Ruby's method_missing method, and PHP's __call. Since JavaScript doesn't support this type of behaviour natively – apart from Firefox's __noSuchMethod, Myriad.js was created to fill the gap!

Examples

// Single property.
myriad.getByName();

// Multiple properties.
myriad.getByNameAndLocationAndSex();

// Arguments.
myriad.getByNameAndLocationAndSex('male');

All of which can be created without any manual method creating at all. In fact, all possible combinations are created so you can construct your method names however you like.

Getting Started

In order to get started, Myriad only requires a couple of parameters from you to begin – the model to create the methods from, and the callback property for the function to invoke.

new Myriad(model, function callback(properties, args) {

});

Myriad has a third argument which accepts a hash for setting additional options.

Callback Scope

Since Myriad has no idea on the desired scope for the callback method, you should use bind (or Underscore's bind) to enforce the context.

_.bind(function callbackWithStringScope() {

    // "String as a scope!?"
    console.log(this);

}, 'String as a scope!?');

Depth

By default Myriad will only delve 3 levels deep into your model, which means that getByNameAndSexAndLocation would be created, but getByNameAndSexAndLocationAndEmployed would not because that's 4 properties. To change the default behaviour to include the latter, you can specify the depth option to set it to 4 or above (or less). For no limit at all you can set the property to Infinity – but be careful.

Options

Sometimes wild beasts need to be tamed! Myriad has a set of options for modifying and restricting the behaviour.

Property	Type	Description
prefix	String	Default prefix for method names is getBy, which can be changed with the prefix option by specifying a string.
depth	Number
connector	String	Allows the overriding of the connecting word, which by default is And.
ignore	Array	Allows to exclude certain property types in an array. Therefore any properties that are of type number could be excluded from being considered as a method name by adding number to the ignore array.
alias	Object	Adds the ability to specify an object to alias the methods on, which results in your objects having the Myriad generated methods directly.

Implementation

Since JavaScript does not natively support any method_missing, __call, or even Python's __getattr__, Myriad uses recursion to generate all possible combinations from your model's properties. Each created method has attached the properties that were used to create it in the first place – which are then passed through to your eventual callback.

Myriad is comprised of essentially two methods – firstly _addIteration is invoked passing in the first property that's discovered on your model. Since Myriad knows of all the properties on your model a difference can be calculated to determine which other properties are required to be attached to it – _addIteration is then called iteratively, adding a new property onto it each and every time until difference eventually yields an empty array.

• _addIteration(['name']);
• _addIteration(['name', 'age']);
• _addIteration(['name', 'age', 'location']);
• _addIteration(['name']);
• _addIteration(['name', 'location']);
• _addIteration(['name', 'location', 'age']);

Once the combinations have been generated, the _createMethod method takes over to generate those methods with the corresponding properties used to generate it.

Contributing

All contributions are welcome provided they come with unit tests. Myriad's tests are written in Mocha in conjunction with Should.js – please refer to the tests/spec.js.

Once you've added your contribution, please open a pull request for it to be merged into master.