Backbone adapter for Windows Azure Mobile Data Services

This project is a backbone adapter for using data from Windows Azure Mobile from your backbone application.

Windows Azure Mobile Services is a cloud based backend service which help streamline common development tasks like structuring storage, integrating push notifications and configuring user authentication.

Using the adapter

Download the distributable file or its minified version and include it in your main HTML file. Ensure that you have a new table created (refer to this this tutorial) that corresponds to the backbone collection. While creating the backbone collection (or model), add a couple of additional values to idenfity the Windows Azure Client and/or table name.

var People = Backbone.Collection.extend({
	client: client, /* something like new WindowsAzure.MobileServiceClient('AppUrl', 'AppKey'),*/
	table: 'Table1' /* Table name as created in Windows Azure Mobile Services dashboard*/ 
	/* ... Other Attributes of the model ... */
});

If the client or the table are not specified, the adapter falls back to using the default backbone.async method.

Querying

Data can be conditionally fetched using the options in the collection.fetch(options) method. The options object can have one or more of the following objects

people.fetch({
	'skip' : count, /* Number of rows to skip before returning the data*/
	'take' : number /* Number of rows to return*/, 
	'where' : {key1:value1, key2:value2} /* Match key1 to value1 and key2 to value2. Can add more conditions*/
});

The where clause above can also take an array with 2 value, the first one being a function and the second one being a value. For example,

people.fetch({
	where: [function(len /* this is the second arg in the arry - in this case, 5* /) {
	  return len > this.length;
	},
	5 /* this number is passed to the function above as an argument */]
});

For more information about the queries, refer to the documentation on skip, take, or where.

Building the project

You would need NodeJS installed on your system. To install grunt, run npm install -g grunt-cli on your command line. Then install all the dependencies using npm install. To build the project, run grunt build. The build process currently runs jshint and minifies the output and places the files in the dist folder.

Running Tests

Once you have built the project (see section above), run grunt dev to start up a local HTTP server that hosts the jasmine test suite. Open http://127.0.0.1:9999/tests/SpecRunner.html in your browser to see the tests run.

Note that you will have update AppUrl and AppKey in \tests\SpecRunner.html (line 24 to line 29) with your information from the Windows Azure Mobile Services Dashboard.