Revert knockout model original state back on update cancel?

Question

I am using knockout in my project. I have some models like EmployeeModel, ServiceModel etc which user can update. On UI I give the user a Cancel control button by which he can revert the changes. On cancel I have to revert the model change back to its original state. For this I found these two good approaches by @rniemeyer:

Protected Observable

I can't use protected observables because I am using ko.mapping plugin which will create a knockout models base on server side viewmodels. Yes, I can use mapping option like Create, but I feel its not a good to keep separate observables state. I want solution which will be reusable and can apply to whole model.

And guess what I got, second good approach by same author @rniemeyer:

Simple editor pattern

I can't use this also because of the same reason I mentioned above. So I wrote 2 functions copy and reset which will do the job for me:

Copy

Here, source is the object whose current state we want to preserve, and dest keeps the current state.

function copy(source, dest) {

    for (var key in source) {

        if (source.hasOwnProperty(key)) {

            //no need to keep knockout added properties
            if (key === "__ko_mapping__")
                continue;

            //recursive call to copy if property is an object
            else if (typeof source[key] === "object") {
                dest[key] = {};
                copy(source[key], dest[key]);
            }

            else {
                //no need to copy the computed observable value
                if (!ko.isComputed(source[key])) {
                    var value = ko.utils.unwrapObservable(source[key]);
                    dest[key] = value;
                }
            }
        }
    }

    //remove all function
    for (var key in dest) {
        if (typeof dest[key] === "function")
            delete dest[key];
    }
}

Reset

Here, source is the previous dest and dest is the previous source.

function reset(source, dest) {

    for (var key in source) {

        if (source.hasOwnProperty(key)) {

            //recursive call to copy if it is an object
            if (source[key] !== null && typeof source[key] === "object") {
                reset(source[key], dest[key]);
            }

            else {
                if (ko.isObservable(dest[key]))
                    dest[key](source[key]);
                else
                    dest[key] = source[key];
            }
        }
    }
}

I want you to please review these function and let me know if these function require any improvement.

Answer 1

From a KISS perspective, I would simply load the model again, then you would not need any of this code.

Other than that the code is clean and maintainable, some nitpicking though:

• You declare var key twice in copy, that is not required
• You are not using hasOwnProperty(key) when you delete all the functions in copy
• You could have merged source.hasOwnProperty(key) and key === "__ko_mapping__" with a &&
• You access source[key] a lot, you could have considered a var value = source[key] and then work with value