Reading and Writing Data

Reading and writing data is done using four high-level methods on Backend instances:

• backend.load()
• backend.store()
• backend.remove()
• backend.upload()

All are asynchronous (i.e. return a Promise object). For consistency, they are asynchronous even when wrapping a synchronous API (e.g. localStorage).

Reading data with backend.load()

async load(url?: string) : Promise<any>;

backend.load() returns a Promise that resolves to the data that was loaded, parsed as JSON.

let data = await backend.load();

You can optionally pass in a URL to load data from, which will override the URL passed to the Backend constructor. This can be either an absolute URL, or a relative URL (e.g. foo.json). If it is an absolute URL, do note it would still need to conform to the type the backend handles (e.g. a GitHub URL for the GitHub backend), otherwise you will get an error. If it's a relative URL, it is interpreted as a relative path within the storage location indicated by the URL passed to the Backend constructor.

let data = await backend.load("foo.json");

By default, data is parsed as JSON, but you can customize that by passing parse and stringify options to the Backend constructor. For example, here we want to store data as CSV, and thus we are using the PapaParse library to parse and stringify the data:

let backend = Backend.create("https://...", {
	parse: Papa.parse,
	stringify: Papa.unparse
});

Storing data with backend.store()

async store(data: any, url?: string) : Promise<object | null>;

This function stores data to the backend, and returns an object with information about the file and/or the editing operation.

Deleting files with backend.remove()

async remove(url?: string) : Promise<void>;

Not every backend supports deleting files, but typically file-based backends (e.g. GitHub File, Google Drive, Dropbox) do. You can check if backend.delete is truthy to see if it's supported.

Uploading files with backend.upload()

async upload(file: File, path?: string) : Promise<string>;

This function uploads a File object and returns an absolute URL to that file.

Not every backend supports uploads, but typically file-based backends (e.g. GitHub File, Google Drive, Dropbox) do. You can check if backend.upload is truthy to see if it's supported. Whether uploads are supported is also listed at the top of the backend's documentation page.

Low level methods

In addition to the high level methods (which are implemented on superclasses), each Backend subclass implements corresponding lower level methods:

• backend.get() (used by backend.load())
• backend.put() (used by backend.store())
• backend.delete() (used by backend.remove())

These methods are not meant to be used directly, except for very specific, niche use cases.