Nov 24, 2014 – By Stanley Stuart

New Core Contributors

Long-time contributors Brendan McLoughlin and Sylvain Mina have been given collaborator status and will help us triage issues, merge pull requests, and contribute bugfixes and documentation.

New Features

store.fetch

When using Ember Data, the most common pattern in the model hook is to call store.find for your model:

export default var PostRoute = Ember.Route.extend({
  model: function(params) {
    return this.store.find('post', params.post_id);
  }
});

store.find will return the instance of the Post record if it has already been fetched in the store. Sometimes, this is not desirable. For example, you may not know if you have already loaded the post in another request via sideloading, or you want the most up to date information. You could either check if the record existed using store.hasRecordForId, or always call reload on your model in the route's afterModelhook.

store.fetch wraps this common pattern by reloading a record if it exists in the store, or reloads the record if it doesn't exist:

model: function(params){
  return this.store.fetch('post', params.post_id);
}

Please give a warm thanks to Tom Coquereau for his pull request implementing this feature!

Bugfixes

relationship.createRecord() returns the record instead of a promise

Prior to Ember Data v1.0.0-beta.11, the following code would give you direct access to a record:

var post    = store.createRecord('post');
var comment = post.get('comments').createRecord('comment');

In beta.11, it returned a Promise, meaning you couldn't call things like set/get on the resulting record. This regression has been fixed in beta.12 thanks to Sébastien Grosjean.

Breaking Changes

Internet Explorer 8 Requires Ember 1.8

A bug in Ember 1.7's Ember.create method (which is a polyfill for Object.create) combined with a bug in es5-shim's Object.create prevent us from giving Ember Data users a good alternative to use. Internally, Ember Data uses Object.create for efficient caches. Ember 1.8 ships a working Object.create polyfill on Ember.create so if you are using Internet Explorer 8 and Ember Data in production, you should upgrade to Ember 1.8 as soon as you can.

If you are using browsers that provide Object.create, you do not need to do any additional work here. This includes mobile browsers, evergreen browsers (Chrome, Opera, Firefox), Safari, and IE9+.

Ember 1.7 Support Will Be Completely Dropped in Beta.13

Ember Data relies heavily on JavaScript language-level shims (such as the Object.create issue mentioned above) and other useful internals that Ember provides. Rather than creating our own detection algorithms and more polyfills for broken code in Ember 1.7, we are deciding to drop 1.7 support in the next release of Ember Data. We do so in order to not increase the final size of Ember Data's build. You should upgrade to Ember 1.8 as soon as you can.

Observing data For Changes Has Been Removed

Although model.get('data') has been private in Ember Data for a long time, we have noticed users may subscribe to changes on data for any change to the model's attributes. This means that the following code:

var Post = DS.Model.extend({
  doSomethingWhenDataChanges: function(){
    // do the work
  }.property('data')
});

no longer works. Instead, you should watch each attribute like you would with any Ember.Object:

var Post = DS.Model.extend({
  name: DS.attr(),
  date: DS.attr(),
  doSomethingWhenDataChanges: function(){
    // do the work
  }.property('name', 'date')
});

This change fixed some bugs around observers. Thanks to Christoffer Persson for helping to clean this up and fix some observer bugs around this!

Special Thanks

Thanks to Christoffer Persson for helping us implement bugfixes and API changes, as well as triaging issues.

[road-to-1]: http://emberjs.com/blog/2014/03/18/the-road-to-ember-data-1-0.html