Mar 13, 2016 – By Brendan McLoughlin

Ember Data 2.4, a minor version release of Ember Data, is released today. This release represents the work of over 20 direct contributors, and over 76 commits.

Ember Data 2.5 beta.1, the branch of Ember Data that will be released as stable in roughly six weeks, is also being released today.

Changes in Ember Data 2.4

Friendly Errors

@nikz has implemented RFC 101 which provides more context for RESTAdapter and JSONAPIAdapter errors in Ember Data. Be sure to check out the pull request for more details.

Importing Modules

@pangratz added public paths to help you import the DS.EmbeddedRecordsMixin and DS.Serializer modules.

// DS.EmbeddedRecordsMixin
import EmbeddedRecordsMixin from 'ember-data/serializers/embedded-records-mixin';

// DS.Serializer
import Serializer from 'ember-data/serializer';

Fastboot Support

@danmcclain added two commits to enable support for Ember Data with the Ember CLI Fastboot addon.

For more details on changes in 2.4, review the Ember Data 2.4.0 CHANGELOG.

Upcoming Features in Ember Data 2.5.beta-1

ds-finder-include

The ds-finder-include feature allows an include query parameter to be specified with using store.findRecord() and store.findAll() as described in RFC 99. The include parameter tells JSON-API servers which relationships to sideload in a response. Thanks to @HeroicEric for implementing this feature.

// GET /articles/1?include=comments

var article = this.store.findRecord('article', 1, { include: 'comments' });

// GET /articles?include=comments

var article = this.store.findAll('article', { include: 'comments' });

ds-references

The ds-references feature implements the references API as described in RFC 57. References is a low level API to perform meta-operations on records, has-many relationships and belongs-to relationships:

• get the current local data synchronously without triggering a fetch or producing a promise
• notify the store that a fetch for a given record has begun, and provide a promise for its result
• similarly, notify a record that a fetch for a given relationship has begun, and provide a promise for its result
• retrieve server-provided metadata about a record or relationship

Consider the following post model:

// app/models/post.js
import Model from 'ember-data/model';
import { belongsTo, hasMany } from 'ember-data/relationships';

export default Model.extend({
  comments: hasMany(),
  author: belongsTo()
});

The references API now allows the possibility to interact with the relationships:

var post = store.peekRecord('post', 1);

// check if the author is already loaded, without triggering a request
if (post.belongsTo('author').value() !== null) {
  console.log(post.get("author.name"));
} else {
  // get the id of the author without triggering a request
  var authorId = post.belongsTo("author").id();

  // load the author
  post.belongsTo('author').load();
  console.log(`Loading author with id ${authorId}`);
}

// reload the author
post.belongsTo('author').reload();

// get all ids without triggering a request
var commentIds = post.hasMany('comments').ids();

// check if there are comments, without triggering a request
if (post.hasMany('comments').value() !== null) {
  var meta = post.hasMany('comments').meta();
  console.log(`${commentIds.length} comments out of ${meta.total}`);
} else {
  post.hasMany('comments').load();
}

// reload comments
post.hasMany('comments').reload();

Thanks to @pangratz for implementing this feature.

ds-transform-pass-options

The ds-transform-pass-options feature allows for smarter transforms by passing the options object from DS.attr([type], [options]) into the transform.

Example

// app/models/post.js
export default DS.Model.extend({
  title: DS.attr('string'),
  markdown: DS.attr('markdown', {
    markdown: {
      gfm: false,
      sanitize: true
    }
  })
});

// app/transforms/markdown.js
export default DS.Transform.extend({
  serialize: function (deserialized, attributeMeta) {
    return deserialized.raw;
  },

  deserialize: function (serialized, attributeMeta) {
    var options = attributeMeta.options.markdown || {};

    return marked(serialized, options);
  }
});

Thanks to @pangratz for implementing this feature and @knownasilya for proposing the RFC.

For more details on changes in the 2.5 beta, please review the Ember Data 2.5.0-beta.1 CHANGELOG.