Loading data objects from the Backendless persistent storage is a fundamental operation a large majority of the online/mobile applications require. Backendless Data Retrieval API is simple, yet very powerful.

In other articles, we’ve discussed how to load object relations using the auto-load and the one-step approach. Both of these approaches return a complex hierarchy of data where the parent object includes child entities at the time when it is retrieved from the server.

In this post, we continue our mission to build a restaurant to-go order app. So far we have put together UI mockups for the future Backendless application, and designed data schema for all the application’s data entities. At this point, we are very close to the coding part.

In another article, we described how to load complex data objects from the persistent storage using the “auto-load” technique. Using that approach, a developer can statically identify specific (child) properties that should be returned along with the parent object(s) when a client app sends a request to load them.

In another post, we describe how to add columns/properties to a Backendless table/class using Backendless Console. The types of properties reviewed in that post were all primitive: string, numbers, dates or boolean values. In addition to these data types, Backendless also supports relationships between objects stored in its persistent storage.

Previously we showed how to declare relationships between tables. Once a relationship is in place, specific objects stored in the tables may be linked with each other.

Another post covered how to retrieve data objects from Backendless. The code in that article loads a collection of the Restaurant objects and although it does not show it, the related collection of the Location objects arrives un-initialized. That is the default behavior of Backendless Database when it comes to loading related objects. The code…

In 2019, the BackendlessDataCollection class was added to Swift-SDK. This class conforms to the Collection protocol and allows you to retrieve and iterate over a collection of objects stored in a Backendless data table.

GraphQL is a powerful language that allows you to extract data from your backend via a single endpoint that can take complex queries and return data in a structure that is appropriate for the client. In this article, we will create a simple application to manage articles. For API, we will use the GraphQL implementation…