Ember Data is a library for robustly managing model data in your Ember.js applications.
Ember Data is designed to be agnostic to the underlying persistence mechanism, so it works just as well with JSON APIs over HTTP as it does with streaming WebSockets or local IndexedDB storage.
It provides many of the facilities you'd find in server-side ORMs like ActiveRecord, but is designed specifically for the unique environment of JavaScript in the browser.
In particular, Ember Data uses Promises/A+-compatible promises from the ground up to manage loading and saving records, so integrating with other JavaScript APIs is easy.
bower install ember-data --save
The latest passing build from the "master" branch is available on http://emberjs.com/builds/#/canary.
Similarly, the latest passing build from the "beta" branch can be found on http://emberjs.com/builds/#/beta
Or build ember-data.js yourself. Clone the repository and run npm run build:production
after setup. You'll find ember-data.js in the dist
directory.
Internet Explorer 8 support requires Ember 1.8.1 (which provides a polyfill for Object.create
).
In Ember Data, the store is responsible for managing the lifecycle of your models. Every time you need a model or a collection of models, you'll ask the store for it.
To create a store, you don't need to do anything. Just by loading the
Ember Data library, all of the routes and controllers in your
application will get a new store
property. This property is an
instance of DS.Store
that will be shared across all of the routes and
controllers in your app.
First thing's first: tell Ember Data about the models in your application. For example, imagine we're writing a blog reader app.
Here's what your model definition would look like if you're using ES6 modules (via ember-cli):
// app/models/blog-post.js
import DS from 'ember-data';
export default DS.Model.extend({
title: DS.attr(),
createdAt: DS.attr('date'),
comments: DS.hasMany('comment')
});
// app/models/comment.js
import DS from 'ember-data';
export default DS.Model.extend({
body: DS.attr(),
username: DS.attr(),
post: DS.belongsTo('blogPost')
});
If you're using globals (that is, not something like ember-cli), your models would look like this:
var attr = DS.attr;
var hasMany = DS.hasMany;
var belongsTo = DS.belongsTo;
App.BlogPost = DS.Model.extend({
title: attr(),
createdAt: attr('date'),
comments: hasMany('comment')
});
App.Comment = DS.Model.extend({
body: attr(),
username: attr(),
post: belongsTo('blogPost')
});
Without immediately diving in to the depths of the architecture, one thing you should know is that Ember Data uses an object called an adapter to know how to talk to your server.
An adapter is just an object that knows how to translate requests from
Ember Data into requests on your server. For example, if I ask the Ember
Data store for a record of type person
with an ID of 123
, the
adapter translates that into an XHR request to (for example)
api.example.com/v3/person/123.json
.
By default, Ember Data will use the RESTAdapter
, which adheres to a
set of RESTful JSON conventions.
To learn more about adapters, including what conventions the
RESTAdapter
follows and how to build your own, see the Ember.js
Guides: Connecting to an HTTP
Server.
From your route or controller:
this.store.findAll('blogPost');
This returns a promise that resolves to the collection of records.
this.store.find('blogPost', 123);
This returns a promise that resolves to the requested record. If the record can't be found or there was an error during the request, the promise will be rejected.
For much more detail on how to use Ember Data, see the Ember.js Guides on models.
Ember Data is still under active development and is currently beta quality. That being said, the API has largely stabilized and many companies are using it in production.
For details on anticipated changes before the 1.0 release, see the blog post The Road to Ember Data 1.0.
- Ensure that Node.js is installed.
- Run
npm install
to ensure the required dependencies are installed. - Run
npm run build:production
to build Ember Data. The builds will be placed in thedist/
directory.
See CONTRIBUTING.md
-
Install Node.js from http://nodejs.org or your favorite package manager.
-
Install Ember CLI and bower.
npm install -g ember-cli bower
-
Run
npm install
inside the project root to install the JS dependencies.
-
To start the development server, run
npm start
. -
Visit http://localhost:4200
-
Install phantomjs from http://phantomjs.org
-
Run
npm test