CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjavascriptdata-binding
raveren
raveren

Reputation: 18541

Bridge between JS and PHP complex data

I am required to build a complex control panel.

It has to be user configured and after he has made an arbitrary number of changes, he submits them and is presented with the newly configured report.

Now there are a lot of possible configuration options and the JS must be able to draw the control elements/init them with values and PHP must do the business logic - all based on given configuration object - and both must be able to change the values of options before passing the object to the other side.

Now the obvious solution is to have predefined configuration objects on both sides:

PHP:

 class config {
     public $anArray = array();
 }

JS:

 {
     anArray : []
 }

And the sides can communicate fluently via json_encode and $.parseJSON.

However, the structure of both entities must match and I've no idea how to ensure that. Has anyone any ideas on how to communicate complex data structures among those two technologies?

EDIT: to clarify, by structure I mean the properties of the two objects: the object itself is a simple configuration wrapper so it has no private properties, no methods etc, only public fields that are scalar or simple indexed arrays.

So I want a solution to develop it in a DRY way: if I want to add a field called for example "paginationEnabled" it should appear in both - the JS and PHP object:

PHP:

 class config {
     public $anArray = array();
     public $paginationEnabled = true;
 }

JS:

 {
     anArray : [],
     paginationEnabled : true
 }

I could implement them separately on both sides, but it would not be DRY (which is terrible in this scenario) and I can sense there must be a solution for that, I just can't think of one.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 829

Answers (1)

Brilliand
Brilliand

Reputation: 13714

The simplest solution is to included the entire JSON-encoded object structure on every request to the server, and in every page returned by the server. This will be necessary anyway since neither PHP nor JavaScript persists between page loads (unless you're using AJAX, which would only make the JavaScript persist anyway).

Of course that only works if the data is already in a form that can be JSON-encoded. (Arrays and simple objects can be encoded to any depth, but not objects of nontrivial classes, file handles or functions.) If it isn't, then you'll need to convert it to one, then convert back on the other end - for example, if the class of an object is important, then you first need to ensure that a corresponding class exists on the other side, then you can indicate the desired classname with {class: $class, value: $value} - and add code on the other end to find that construction and rebuild an object of the desired class. If you need to copy functions across, then that might be manageable if you store all of your functions as JavaScript, and include a JavaScript interpreter library in PHP. That's probably more trouble than it's worth, however.

If the JSON object is much too large to send on every request, then you're left with storing it in the database (in a form suitable for databases) and using AJAX to update the database when something changes on the JavaScript side, or to retrieve any part of the object that the client code doesn't already have.

Upvotes: 3

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