Mapping – first look

We have been creating manual maps of our ViewModel so far in this book. With smaller datasets this can be practical and productive. As our datasets get larger along with the need to update the data, this will become a chore that has an alternative, enjoyed by a great number of Knockout developers. This is done through a mapping plugin. Knockout is a jQuery-based library in more than one way. It is possible to build and use libraries, called plugins, for Knockout also. The most famous library is the mapping library. I have included a copy of it in the downloaded files for this book. We will be looking again at the preceding code for our example but moving it this time using the mapping plugin.

We will create a file called mapping.html for our code this time. We will need to include one more JavaScript file right after the Knockout call for our mapping plugin. You can find these files in the working examples folder in the ZIP download. This, in our case, should...