What is a Smart Collection?
A Smart Collection is a Forest Collection based on your API implementation. It allows you to reconcile fields of data coming from different or external sources in a single tabular view (by default), without having to physically store them into your database.
Fields of data could be coming from many other sources such as other B2B SaaS (e.g. Zendesk, Salesforce, Stripe), in-memory database, message broker, etc.
This is an advanced notion. If you’re just starting with Forest, you should skip this for now.
customer_statsallowing us to see all customers who have placed orders, the number of order placed and the total amount of those orders.
For an example of advanced customization and featuring an Amazon S3 integration, you can see here how we’ve stored in our live demo the companies’ legal documents on Amazon S3 and how we’ve implemented a Smart Collection to access and manipulate them.
Creating a Smart Collection
SQL
Mongoose
Rails
Django
Laravel
First, we declare the customer_stats collection in the forest/ directory.In this Smart Collection, we want to display for each customer its email address, the number of orders made (in a field orders_count) and the sum of the price of all those orders (in a field total_amount).You can check out the list of available field options if you need it.You MUST declare an id field when creating a Smart Collection. The value of this field for each record MUST be unique.As we are using the customer id in this example, we do not need to declare an id manually.
const { collection } = require('forest-express-sequelize');
const models = require('../models');
collection('customer_stats', {
isSearchable: true,
fields: [
{
field: 'email',
type: 'String',
},
{
field: 'orders_count',
type: 'Number',
},
{
field: 'total_amount',
type: 'Number',
},
],
});
The optionisSearchable: true added to your collection allows to display the search bar. Note that you will have to implement the search yourself by including it into your own get logic.
Work in progress - this section will soon be released
First, we declare the CustomerStat collection in the lib/forest-liana/collections/ directory.In this Smart Collection, we want to display for each customer its email address, the number of orders made (in a field orders_count) and the sum of the price of all those orders (in a field total_amount).You can check out the list of available field options if you need it.You MUST declare an id field when creating a Smart Collection. The value of this field for each record MUST be unique.As we are using the customer id in this example, we do not need to declare an id manually.
class Forest::CustomerStatsController < ForestLiana::ApplicationController
require 'jsonapi-serializers'
before_action :set_params, only: [:index]
class BaseSerializer
include JSONAPI::Serializer
def type
'customerStat'
end
def format_name(attribute_name)
attribute_name.to_s.underscore
end
def unformat_name(attribute_name)
attribute_name.to_s.dasherize
end
end
class CustomerStatSerializer < BaseSerializer
attribute :email
attribute :total_amount
attribute :orders_count
end
def index
customers_count = Customer.count_by_sql("
SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM customers
WHERE
EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM orders
WHERE orders.customer_id = customers.id
)
AND email LIKE '%#{@search}%'
")
customer_stats = Customer.find_by_sql("
SELECT customers.id,
customers.email,
count(orders.*) AS orders_count,
sum(products.price) AS total_amount,
customers.created_at,
customers.updated_at
FROM customers
JOIN orders ON customers.id = orders.customer_id
JOIN products ON orders.product_id = products.id
WHERE email LIKE '%#{@search}%'
GROUP BY customers.id
ORDER BY customers.id
LIMIT #{@limit}
OFFSET #{@offset}
")
customer_stats_json = CustomerStatSerializer.serialize(customer_stats, is_collection: true, meta: {count: customers_count})
render json: customer_stats_json
end
private
def set_params
@limit = params[:page][:size].to_i
@offset = (params[:page][:number].to_i - 1) * @limit
@search = sanitize_sql_like(params[:search]? params[:search] : "")
end
def sanitize_sql_like(string, escape_character = "\\")
pattern = Regexp.union(escape_character, "%", "_")
string.gsub(pattern) { |x| [escape_character, x].join }
end
end
Rails.application.routes.draw do
# MUST be declared before the mount ForestLiana::Engine.
namespace :forest do
get '/CustomerStat' => 'customer_stats#index'
end
mount ForestLiana::Engine => '/forest'
end
First we will add the right path to the urls.py fileThen we will create the pertained view
Create a controller CustomerStatsControllerThen add the route.Now we are all set, we can access the Smart Collection as any other collection.In this example we have only implemented the GET all records action but you can also add the following actions: GET specific records, PUT, DELETE and POST. These are shown in the next page explaining how a Smart Collection can be used to access and manipulate data stored in Amazon S3.
