Labs/Ubiquity/Writing Noun Types: Difference between revisions

'''Registering an asynchronous call'''

If you are performing asynchronous calls to web services, your noun type must tell Ubiquity about these calls so that Ubiquity will know to wait for those requests to come back before completing the query. For this to work, all you need to do is pass an object back to Ubiquity in the return array of your suggest method which represents the asynchronous request. This could be an ajax request object, or any object that represents your request. If you're using an object other than an ajax request, you need to add a readyState attribute to that object and set it's value to 2. This tells Ubiquity that your request is still outstanding. When the async request is finished, update this value to 4. When the ready state value of the async request is 4, Ubiquity will remove it from the list of outstanding requests.

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'''Returning results asynchronously'''

The suggest method of your noun type is passed a callback function which you can use to return results asynchronously. When you are ready to send Ubiquity a new suggestion, simply execute the callback function with your suggestion as the argument.

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'''The noExternalCalls property'''

In an effort to limit the number of network calls made, noun types use a special property for telling Ubiquity whether or not they use external calls, called noExternalCalls.