Vue Metadata Layer

The metadata layer, generated as metadata.g.ts, contains information about the types, properties, methods, and other components of your data model. Because Vue applications are typically compiled into a set of static assets, it is necessary for the frontend code to have a representation of your data model as an analog to the ReflectionRepository that is available at runtime in your .NET app.

Concepts

The following is a non-exhaustive list of the general concepts used by the metadata layer. The source code of coalesce-vue provides the most exhaustive set of documentation about the metadata layer:

Metadata

All objects in the metadata layer that represent any kind of metadata have, at the very least, a name, the name of the metadata element in code (type names, property names, parameter names, etc). and a displayName, the human-readable form of the name that is suitable for presentation when needed. Names follow the casing convention of their corresponding language elements - types are PascalCased, while other things like properties, methods, and parameters are camelCased.

Type

All custom types exposed by your application's data model will have a Type metadata object generated. This includes both C# classes, and C# enums. Class types include model (for Entity Models and Custom DTOs) and object (for External Types).

Value

In the metadata layer, a Value is the usage of a type. This could be any type - strings, numbers, enums, classes, or even void. Values can be found in the collection of an object's properties, a method's parameters or return value, or as a data source's parameters.

All values have the following properties:

type: TypeDiscriminator

Type could be a language primitive like string or number, a non-primitive JavaScript type (date, file), or in the case of a custom Type, the type kind of that type (model, enum, object). For custom types, an additional property typeDef will refer to the Type metadata for that type.

role: ValueRole

Role represents what purpose the value serves in a relational model. Either value (the default - no relational role), primaryKey, foreignKey, referenceNavigation, or collectionNavigation.

Property

A Property is a more refined Value that contains a number of additional fields based on the role of the property.

Domain

The type of the default export of the generated metadata. Serves as a single root from which all other metadata can be accessed. Contains fields types, enums, and services as organizing structures for the different kinds of custom types.