Meta Attributes

[ericelliott]

"Title" is a useful meta attribute for Siren messages, but there may be other useful meta attributes, as well. Specifically, I propose "entityCount" and "description" attributes.

I like the idea of keeping metadata separate from the resource properties. For example, following my understanding of the current spec, siren-resource will produce the following output for a resource:

{
  "title": "Albums",
  "properties": {
    "description": "Some great albums you should listen to.",
    "entityCount": 1
  },
  "entities": [
    {
      "id": "chmzq50np0002gfixtr1qp64o",
      "name": "Settle",
      "artist": "Disclosure",
      "artistId": "chmzq4l480001gfixe8a3nzhm",
      "coverImage": "/covers/medium/zrms5gxr.jpg",
      "year": "2013",
      "genres": [
        "electronic",
        "house",
        "garage",
        "UK garage",
        "future garage"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "entityAttributes": {
    "rel": [
      "item"
    ],
    "class": [
      "album"
    ]
  },
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": [
        "self"
      ],
      "href": "/albums"
    }
  ]
}

However, I think this would be better expressed like this:

{
  "title": "Albums",
  "description": "Some great albums you should listen to.",
  "entityCount": 1,
  "entities": [
    {
      "id": "chmzq50np0002gfixtr1qp64o",
      "name": "Settle",
      "artist": "Disclosure",
      "artistId": "chmzq4l480001gfixe8a3nzhm",
      "coverImage": "/covers/medium/zrms5gxr.jpg",
      "year": "2013",
      "genres": [
        "electronic",
        "house",
        "garage",
        "UK garage",
        "future garage"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "entityAttributes": {
    "rel": [
      "item"
    ],
    "class": [
      "album"
    ]
  },
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": [
        "self"
      ],
      "href": "/albums"
    }
  ]
}

Note that this is also using the proposed "entityAttributes" extension, which I proposed in [#17].

[ericelliott]

On second thought, these things could all possibly be useful to the user of the client app. Let's leave them on properties.