Headless

In a headless Brightspot implementation, the view system delivers content via a JSON API to a consuming application; that application processes and transforms the content using its own logic. In headless Brightspot implementations, two scenarios are common:

• Delivering APIs to mobile applications
• Delivering APIs to JavaScript frameworks ( React , Angular , or others)

Producing your JSON API requires two steps:

1. Create a model
2. Create a view model

The following sections provide examples for each of those steps.

The following snippet is a basic model for an article.

import com.psddev.cms.db.Content;
import com.psddev.dari.db.Recordable;

public class Article extends Content {

    private String headline;

    private String body;

    public String getHeadline() {
        return headline;
    }

    public void setHeadline(String headline) {
        this.headline = headline;
    }

    public String getBody() {
        return body;
    }

    public void setBody(String body) {
        this.body = body;
    }
}

The following snippet is a headless view model that serializes a model’s data into JSON format.

import com.psddev.cms.view.JsonView;
import com.psddev.cms.view.PageEntryView;
import com.psddev.cms.view.ViewInterface;
import com.psddev.cms.view.ViewModel;

@JsonView 
@ViewInterface
public class ArticleViewModel extends ViewModel<Article> implements PageEntryView { 

    public String getBody() {
        return model.getBody();
    }

    public String getHeadline() {
        return model.getHeadline();
    }
}

At run time, Brightspot manages the interaction between the model and view model to produce the JSON file containing field names and associated values.

{
  "headline" : "JSON Example",
  "body" : "Brightspot automatically produces JSON from the view model."
}

The consuming application has the responsibility of processing the JSON output for downstream purposes.