Transforms have no idea about attributes

[louy]

I'd like to discuss an issue that I have faced recently using Ember data.

As I see it, the current functionality of Transforms is very limited, which shouldn't be the case. Specifically, there is no way to know anything about the Model or the attribute in Transform which makes a few use cases hard to implement. For example, ember-data.model-fragments#96.

What I suggest here is that there could be a way for the transform class to know which model and/or which attribute it's serializing/deserializing, so that it can have far more functionality. Then it will also be able to read attribute's meta and apply some filters according to that. I think there are many use cases for this (like String.trim().)

I'm not sure if this fits the concept of transform, but I believe it would be a good thing to have. What do you think?

[igorT]

I know @wycats was against this before for simplicity sake, but I had hacked together in couple apps, so seems beneficial. I'll tag it for review

[fivetanley]

We have chosen to not support this API. @tomdale says this introduces too much complexity. We have decided to implement emberjs/rfcs#1 instead, which should allow you to do this kind of thing, even if it is less dynamic in nature.