Make ResourceGraphBuilder extensible

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I need to make a resource type accessable through JADNC that is part of a third party lib. So I can’t add AttrAttribute to the properties of this type.

Describe the solution you’d like It would be nice if it was possible to extend the ResourceGraphBuilder. Maybe through JsonApiResourceDefinition? Sadly, the methods CreateResourceType and GetAttributes are private and sealed off.

Or did I miss another way to do this?

[bart-degreed]

Hi @Khaos66, thanks for asking.

I agree that ResourceGraphBuilder being non-sealed without any virtual members is not very useful. We could open it up for extension, but in your case, that’s not going to solve your problem for two reasons:

• Building the graph requires to set ResourceFieldAttribute.Property, whose setter is internal.
• Resources must implement IIdentifiable, which requires the 3rd party library to have a dependency on JsonApiDotNetCore.

The way to solve this is by wrapping the type from the 3rd party library. I’ve attached a sample project that wraps System.Version. You can run it with F5, which shows sample data.

WrappedThirdPartyResourceDemoApi.zip

For convenience, I’m adding the wrapper here as text too:

[Resource("versions")]
public sealed class VersionResource : Identifiable<string>
{
    private Version _innerVersion = new();

    public override string Id
    {
        get => _innerVersion.ToString();
        set => _innerVersion = value == null ? new Version() : Version.Parse(value);
    }

    [Attr]
    public int Major
    {
        get => _innerVersion.Major;
        set => _innerVersion = new Version(value, _innerVersion.Minor);
    }

    [Attr]
    public int Minor
    {
        get => _innerVersion.Minor;
        set => _innerVersion = new Version(_innerVersion.Major, value);
    }
}

when running the project, it requests:

GET http://localhost:24883/releases?include=version

Which returns:

{
  "links": {
    "self": "http://localhost:24883/releases?include=version",
    "first": "http://localhost:24883/releases?include=version"
  },
  "data": [
    {
      "type": "releases",
      "id": "1",
      "attributes": {
        "title": "JsonApiDotNetCore"
      },
      "relationships": {
        "version": {
          "links": {
            "self": "http://localhost:24883/releases/1/relationships/version",
            "related": "http://localhost:24883/releases/1/version"
          },
          "data": {
            "type": "versions",
            "id": "1.2"
          }
        }
      },
      "links": {
        "self": "http://localhost:24883/releases/1"
      }
    }
  ],
  "included": [
    {
      "type": "versions",
      "id": "1.2",
      "attributes": {
        "major": 1,
        "minor": 2
      },
      "links": {
        "self": "http://localhost:24883/versions/1.2"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Hope that helps.

[bart-degreed]

Glad to help 😃