Creating empty Restangular elements?

Hi,

I love Restangular very much. Last time I hit an edge case using it and this is maybe my misconception about how it works. Please close this if I don’t get this right.

I’m using Restangular.extendModel to add methods for changing values acording to system for handling units. The problem is that this works fine if I get objects from server. If I want to create object in browser then until I send object and get back restangularized object then I’m without that methods from model.

Can I create restangular element that won’t be send?

So imagine something like this (this code could have some errors, I just write it to show use case):

Restangular.extendModel('building', function (model) {
    model._getLength = function (value) {
        if (service.isImperial()) {
            return value * 23.5
        } else {
            return value;
        }
    };
}

var building = Restangular.one('building', 1).get();   
building._getLength(2); // works

var building_2 = {}; // How to create object without sending it to server??
building_2._getLength(2) // doesn't work
Restangular.all('building').post(building_2).then(function(obj){
    building_2 = obj;
    building_2._getLength(2) // work again
});  // Until POST I don't have method from models

[daviesgeek]

From reading the original example, it looks like you should be able to do this:

var building_2 = {}
Restangular.restangularizeElement(null, building_2, 'building')
building_2._getLength(2)

http://plnkr.co/edit/FNwFGjTnAfC4lHasGiB5?p=preview

[rhys-vdw]

This is a big hole in the Restangular API, as far as I can tell. The most confusing thing about Restangular is that it presents a save method which is meant to automatically determine whether to use PUT or POST, but has no way of creating models that don’t already exist…

This is my patch, but it’s imperfect:

Configurer.setOnElemRestangularized(function(elem, isCollection, what, Restangular) {
  var collection;
  if (isCollection) {
    collection = elem;
    collection.create = function(properties) {
      var instance = Restangular.restangularizeElement(
        collection.parentResource,
        properties || {},
        collection.route
      );
      return instance;
    };
  }
  return elem;
});

However it generates incorrect routes in some cases, so it obviously needs some work. If you can get this approach working I’d love to hear what I’m doing wrong.