The specification is also evolving and its implementation has differences even in the browsers that implement it. In the previous post, I wrote about how Chrome implements setVersion, while Firefox has been supporting the onupgradeneeded method as per the newer version of the specification.
This post is about a project that I am currently working on - bringing the IndexedDB technology to browsers that only have WebSql as the database. WebSql iteself has shims implemented and this should work well over those shims too.
So far, the simpler operations like object stores, data get and put, and cursors have been implemented. The shim is based on the implementation of IndexedDB in Firefox. Since WebSql provides a transactional SQLite like platform, translating IndexedDB concepts to the WebSql world was easy.
IDBDatabase
A database in IndexedDB corresponds directly to a database in WebSql. An additional, top level database called __sysdb__ is added to keep track of the database versions etc. WebSql database versions were not used in this implementation.Note that there is no implementation of db.close()
IDBTransaction
The transactions for IndexedDB directly correspond to transactions in WebSql. The lack of the abort method in WebSQL Transactions is overcome by throwing an exception to cancel the transaction.
IDBObjectStore
An IndexedDB Object Store is corresponds to a table in WebSql. Every database also has a __sys__ table that tracks meta data like autoIncrement, keyPath, etc about object stores. Adding data to the object store is added using a record in the table that looks like {keyId, value}. I hope to use the Firefox Key implementation to allow collations, but for now, all keys are simply JSON strings. Values are also not obtained using the Structured Cloning algorithm, but using JSON.stringify for now. KeyPaths are evaluated when required using eval. Since SQLite allows only integer keys for autoIncrement, an extra inc column is added to such tables to keep track of the auto increment values.
IDBCursors
Cursors are implemented using offset and limit queries in WebSql. Continue simply selects the next element and a variable saves the offset value that should be applied to the query.
IDBIndexes
Indexes are still not implemented yet and I am working on getting Indexes working. I am looking at the way Firefox implements indexes.
Testing
You can run the tests on Chrome, Opera and Safari using the page at http://nparashuram.com/IndexedDB/polyfill/. In chome, you should be able to open the Resources tab to see the various tables created by the implementation and how they correspond to IndexedDB constructs.
You can watch out this space for updates. Please feel free to fork the project on github and help me confirm to the standards better. I am doing test driven development, and you can run the tests at http://nparashuram.com/IndexedDB/polyfill/
I hope that this plugin makes the IndexedDB API available in more places, enabling faster adoption of the specification.
