ember-data-tastypie-adapter

Motivation

• django-tastypie is one of the most widely used libraries to provide a REST interface from a django App.
• The ember-data default RESTAdapter does not follow the conventions used in django-tastypie.
• Instead of forcing the django developer to adapt tastypie to ember-data conventions, this adapter does the dirty work.

Usage

Javascript side

• You can either:

  • import the lib/tastypie_serializer.js and lib/tastypie_adapter.js files, or
  • use the ember-data-tastypie-adapter package on your build process. or
  • use dist/tastypie_adapter.js after running bundle && bundle exec rakep build or simply rake dist

• To use the adapter with your store:

Basic code to use the adapter:

  App.ApplicationAdapter = DS.DjangoTastypieAdapter.extend({});
  App.ApplicationSerializer = DS.DjangoTastypieSerializer.extend({});

Creating with several parameters:

  App.ApplicationAdapter = DS.DjangoTastypieAdapter.extend({
    serverDomain: "http://yourDomain.com",
    namespace: "api/v1"
  });

Python/Django side

The standard django-tastypie configuration will do the work. However, some details are important:

i) ember-data always expects data in return (except in deletions). Make sure to configure your Resources with the meta option if you are going to perform POST or PUT operations:

class Meta:
    always_return_data = True

ii) obviously, the permissions must be configured in the server to allow GET, POST, PUT and DELETE methods to provide fully access to CRUD operations. Usually, django-tastypie will require an Authorization meta option to allow writing

class Meta:
    authorization = Authorization()
    detail_allowed_methods = ['get', 'post', 'put', 'delete']
    always_return_data = True

Ember-data relationship fields

Ember-data (and this adapter) supports two kind of relationship fields: hasMany and belongsTo. There are two methods of handling relationship fields with tastypie:

• Async Resources

  • The related data is not present in the response of the parent model, so ember-data uses promise objects to represent such fields

  • Related data is fetched asynchronously, when the code tries to access the field of the model

  • This adaptor expects tastypie to return only related resource urls in the response, so:

    • Tastypie resources must not use full=True in the relationship fields
    • Ember-data model should define the relationship with async: true option

  • Example model definition

      App.Comment = DS.Model.extend({
          text: attr("string")
      })
    
      App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
          text: attr("string"),
          comments: hasMany("comment", {async: true})
      })
    

• Embedded Resources

  • The related model's data is embedded in the response of the parent model, so there is no need to fetch the related model using its own resource uri

  • This adaptor expects tastypie to return full data of related model in the same response:

    • Tastypie resources must use full=True in the relationship fields
    • Ember-data model should define the relationship without async: true option. async is false by default.

  • Example model definition

      App.Comment = DS.Model.extend({
          text: attr("string")
      })
    
      App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
          text: attr("string"),
          comments: hasMany("comment")
      })
    

Note: In both the cases, (for now) it is mandatory for the related models to have their own URLs to support proper CRUD operations

Contributing

This adapter may be useful for someone in the ember.js/django community. If you want to extend it, please open issues and send pull requests.

Bulk Commits note

This adapter does not support bulkCommits and does not plan to do it soon. django-tastypie REST implementation differs from the Ruby on Rails one, widely used by the ember.js community. Although bulkCommits can be implemented with PATCH operations, I didn't like the resulting adapter.

Unit tests

Browser

Go to the tests directory and type:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Go to http://localhost:8000/tests/ to run the Qunit tests.

Terminal (PhantomJS)

# Run once
rake test

# Run continuosly listening for changes (OS X only)
rake autotest

Versions

In the meantime ember-data reachs 1.0, custom compilations have been used to test the adapter.

ember.js

1.5.0

ember-data

1.0.0-beta.7

Contributors

• Diego Muñoz Escalante
• Pepe Cano
• olofsj
• Mitchel Kelonye
• Dzmitry Dzemidzenka
• Pedro Kiefer
• Alex Goodwin
• Aaron Ghent

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2014 Diego Muñoz Escalante