Metadata

The generated metadata provides a client-side representation of your backend data model's structure and behavior, enabling type-aware operations and dynamic interfaces in your Vue application. Since Vue applications are compiled to static assets and can't perform runtime reflection like .NET applications, the metadata serves as a static analog to the ReflectionRepository available in your .NET backend. The metadata is generated as metadata.g.ts and contains comprehensive information about the types, properties, methods, and other components of your data model.

Concepts

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

Metadata

All objects in the metadata 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 CRUD Models) and object (for Simple Models).

Value

In the metadata, 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.