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Creating the Smart Collection

Let’s take a simple example from Kibana, we will use a set of fictitious accounts with randomly generated data. You can easily import the data using Kibana Home page section Ingest your data. When it’s done we can start looking at how to play with those data in Forest.

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forest-express-sequelize

First, we declare the bank-accounts collection in the forest/ directory. In this Smart Collection, all fields are related to document mapping attributes except the field id that is computed using the document _id. You can check out the list of available field options if you need them.
You MUST declare an id field when creating a Smart Collection. The value of this field for each record MUST be unique. On the following example, we simply use the UUID provided on every Elasticsearch documents.
You can add the option isSearchable: true to your collection to display the search bar. Note that you will have to implement the search yourself by including it into your own GET logic.

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Implementing the routes

It’s not an easy job to connect several data sources in the same structure. To accommodate you in this journey we already provide you a simple service ElasticsearchHelper that handles all the logic to connect with your Elasticsearch data.
Before getting further, in order to search your data using filters, we need to define the Elasticsearch configuration.
NameTypeDescription
indexstringThe name of your Elasticsearch index.
filterDefinitionstringType of your Elasticsearch fields. Can be number, date, text,keyword
sortarray of objects(optional) Required only to sort your data. Elasticsearch documentation Example: [ { createdAt: { order: 'desc' } }]
mappingFunctionfunction(optional) Required only to modify the data retrieved from Elasticsearch. Example: (id, source) => { id, ...source}
Our custom filter translator only support number, keyword, text, date data types. Nonetheless, you can implement more filter mapper type in theutils/filter-translator.js

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Implementing the GET (all records)

In the file routes/bank-accounts.js, we’ve created a new route to implement the API behind the Smart Collection. The logic here is to list all the BankAccount records. We use a custom service service/elasticsearch-helper.js for this example. The implementation code of this service is available here. Finally, the last step is to serialize the response data in the expected format which is simply a standard JSON API document. You are lucky forest-express-sequelize already does this for you using the RecordSerializer. 
// Imports and ElasticsearchHelper base definition ...

router.delete(
  '/bank-accounts/:id',
  permissionMiddlewareCreator.delete(),
  async (request, response, next) => {
    try {
      await elasticsearchHelper.removeRecord(request.params.id);
      response.status(204).send();
    } catch (e) {
      next(e);
    }
  }
);

module.exports = router;

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Delete a list of records

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forest-express-sequelize

// Imports and ElasticsearchHelper base definition ...

router.post(
  '/bank-accounts',
  permissionMiddlewareCreator.create(),
  (request, response, next) => {
    const recordCreator = new RecordCreator(
      { name: 'bank-accounts' },
      request.user,
      request.query
    );

    recordCreator
      .deserialize(request.body)
      .then((recordToCreate) =>
        elasticsearchHelper.createRecord(recordToCreate)
      )
      .then((record) => recordCreator.serialize(record))
      .then((recordSerialized) => response.send(recordSerialized))
      .catch(next);
  }
);

module.exports = router;