Tracking object references in JavaScript

It is a common case in AngularJS to have some model loaded on the main view (like list of objects) and to use these objects in other controllers (like the object details view). Usually it's done by holding the reference of the list object in other controller scope, to interact with this reference. Until these both objects point to each other (both references point to the same object) it's very fine. The changes from the details controller are reflected in a list and contrarywise.

But I frequently come across the situation where at least one of these objects is refreshed from the server (eg. in async comet event) and this relationship is lost. A lot of case-by-case code is required to be written to support such instances on the client side.

Today I've been thinking about tracking the object references generally in JavaScript and how it can be done. Unfortunately it looks that it can't. JavaScript doesn't really support real references like eg. in C language, that could be used to achieve this. In JS function there's no way to have access to reference that carries the object as the function argument, and thus to modify this reference.

But indeed there's a way to have access to the reference - using the closure. Closure holds references to all objects belonging to the closure scope. After a little time of playing I figured out some solution for such hypothetical reference tracker:

And it works :)

Now, we have some more complex case. We are just re-assigning single object holding whole list, and we may have only the item (from the example above) assigned elsewhere. This is not as simple as the previous example, but feasible if we think about the model as persistent objects model. All persistent objects have some unique ID assigned. For example if you use UUID on server side, it can be UUID. If you use the numeric ID, it can be combination of ID and object type (class) etc. You can always figure out easily some other method to have unique ID for you objects some way.

In such instance, to achieve the goal we need to have the previous JSON structure, and to scan new one, looking for objects with the same ID, and then reuse our "reference tracker" above. Here is full source including the new usage:

To have it clean, I  also added cleanup() function to clean the objects from $ref reference, to have clean objects for JSON representation to be sent to server.