Dec 25, 2014 – By Stanley Stuart

Due to a hiccup during the publishing step while releasing beta.13, we've removed beta.13 from npm and instead published beta.14. This release is available to you whether you are using npm and ember-cli, rubygems, or bower. Note that the builds are always available as static files at emberjs.com/builds.

Improvements

Igor Terzic, David Hamilton, and Stefan Penner put in some great strides to improve performance around how relationships work together in Ember Data. These performance changes have wide-reaching effects into everything you do in Ember Data: querying records, pushing records into the store, and creating records. Since everyone on the Ember Data team works on real apps, we tested these changes in our applications and saw improvements averaging 50% or higher around pushing and creating records into the store.

Breaking Changes

store.update() has been deprecated

Calling store.update() has been deprecated in favor of store.push() now handling partial payloads:

var post = store.push('post', {
  id: 1,
  title: 'Ember.js is fantastic',
  author: 'Tomster'
});

post.get('title'); // => 'Ember.js is fantastic'
post.get('author'); // => 'Tomster'

store.push('post', { id: 1, author: 'Tom Dale' });

post.get('title'); // => 'Ember.js is fantastic'
post.get('author'); // => 'Tom Dale'

This also means that properties missing in the payload will no longer be reset, but stay the same.

If you need to reset values to null, you should have your server explicitly send back null values in the payload:

{
  "person": {
    "firstName": null,
    "lastName": null
    "role": "Computer Science Pioneer"
  }
}

If you cannot change your API and you desire this behavior, you can create a serializer and do the logic yourself:

// app/serializers/person.js
// or App.PersonSerializer if you aren't using Ember CLI
export default DS.RESTSerializer.extend({
  normalize: function(type, hash, prop) {
    hash = this._super(type, hash, prop);
    if (!hash.hasOwnProperty('firstName')){
      hash.firstName = null;
    }
    if (!hash.hasOwnProperty('lastName')){
      hash.lastName = null;
    }
    return hash;
  }
});

Or if you want to restore the old behavior for all of your models:

// app/serializers/application.js
// or App.ApplicationSerializer
export default DS.RESTSerializer.extend({
  normalize: function(type, hash, prop) {
    hash = this._super(type, hash, prop);
    type.eachAttribute(function(key) {
      if (!hash.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
        hash[key] = null;
      }
    }, this);
    return hash;
  }
});

Special Thanks

A special thanks to Dockyard for sponsoring Igor during the month of December!