Changes to API

[stefanoverna]

And here's an example of usage: https:/stefanoverna/spike-datocms-example/blob/master/app.js

The main changes:

• Remove the API parsing logic from spike-datocms, reuse the datocms-client ItemsRepo for that. This means that in the views you can access to every content stored in the DatoCMS backend as described in the documentation (https://docs.datocms.com/other/accessing-records.html and later chapters).
• Change the way you declare single pages in app.js: https:/stefanoverna/spike-datocms-example/blob/master/app.js#L29-L33
• Introduce a dato-meta-tags directive that you can use in your views to populate the of your page (a similar thing should be made to generate favicon meta tags)

[jescalan]

So it looks like the tests are failing here still, but definitely understand what you're after in general and want to get this merged 👍

[jescalan]

Very clever way of making this happen! Curious if you had any other thoughts working with reshape and its API

[stefanoverna]

That was an hack actually 😛 I'm not using reshape to generate the HTML, resorting to some external helper. I don't think that's very advisable... it would be better to return some reshape AST nodes instead, so that they could then be further processed by other reshape plugins down the chain (ie. reshape/minify). I could not find a way to do that though... 🆘

[jescalan]

why remove the cache feature?

[stefanoverna]

Well, DatoCMS pushes some websocket notifications everytime the content changes:

const SiteChangeWatcher = require('datocms-client/dump/SiteChangeWatcher');
const watcher = new SiteChangeWatcher(site.id);
watcher.connect(function() { 
  console.log('Data changed!'); 
});

So I think we should definitely get rid of the cache option, and automatically cache between these notifications.

[jescalan]

Also removing the writeJson feature?

[stefanoverna]

that was just temporary, I can re-enable it, but I thought that was redundant, as you can use the the singlePages option to do the same. Well, not at the moment, because the writeTemplate is not using webpack, right?

[stefanoverna]

@jescalan if you like the overall direction of the proposed changes, I can finalize things and write tests. Let me know if I can start :)

[jescalan]

@stefanoverna Yeah, I would say don't worry about the meta tags helper, I can take that section, but as far as the primary piece with using the client, I think this is good to start testing!

Interesting with the websockets though, this is really cool. I can also hook this up to the watcher, don't worry about that part.

[stefanoverna]

Hi @jescalan, we're receiving requests regarding this PR on our support chat.. looking forward to close it! 😃 I'm not very familiar with the internals of spike so I would really need some help of yours :)

[jescalan]

So, this is massively breaking and still has no tests at all, so I can't really merge it yet, it still needs a bunch of work. Also, what's being asked there can already be accomplished with the plugin as it exists - you're welcome to direct them here to the issues section in this repo with questions!