Source plugins are expected to add data to two specific data buckets.

Products like content management systems typically have the concept of models or content types. Source plugins are expected to add information about these models to the models data bucket, as objects with the following properties:

💡 For data sources that don't have the concept of a project ID or environment, these values can be set to an empty string.

The objects data bucket contains all entries coming from the various data sources. Source plugins must normalize all entries before adding them to the data bucket. This normalization consists of adding a property called __metadata, containing an object with the following properties:

All content fields should be placed at the root level of the entry object.

• 🚫

  {
    "type": "blog",
    "meta": {
      "_id": "123456789",
      "created_at": "2011-10-05T14:48:00.000Z",
      "updated_at": "2011-10-05T15:30:00.000Z"
    },
    "fields": {
      "title": "Normalizing entries",
      "subtitle": "Because normal is good"
    }
  }

• ✅

  {
    "title": "Normalizing entries",
    "subtitle": "Because normal is good",
    "__metadata": {
      "id": "123456789",
      "source": "source-source-contentful",
      "modelName": "blog",
      "modelLabel": "Blog posts",
      "projectId": "1q2w3e4r",
      "projectEnvironment": "master",
      "createdAt": "2011-10-05T14:48:00.000Z",
      "updatedAt": "2011-10-05T15:30:00.000Z"
    }
  }

💡 For data sources that don't have the concept of a unique ID for each entry, you're advised to auto-generate one using a package like https://www.npmjs.com/package/uuid.

Asset objects are subject to an additional normalization routine. The structure of the objects will be changed so that they always contain the following properties, in addition to any user-defined properties if the source supports it:

• contentType (String): The MIME type describing the asset type
• fileName (String): The name of the original file
• url (String): The full asset URL

A __metadata block will still be added, but the value of the modelName property will be set to __asset.