CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ember.jsember-data
blueFast
blueFast

Reputation: 44361

Heterogeneous objects in a single URL: are undefined properties set to null?

I am trying to add a "profile management" functionality to my Ember application, using ember-data. For that, my backend / frontend play together in the following way:

  1. The backend returns a profile array with several "profile objects", with well-known IDs, for the logged-in user, in a fixed URL: /api/profile. Currently I have a me object (settings related to currently logged in user) and a my-company object (settings related to the company belonging to the current logged-in user). It is straightforward to add more objects. The objects are not of the same kind, and have different properties. There is only one object of each kind.
  2. I can view and edit each of the objects using different router/controller/template. Most of the functionality is reusable. For the routers and controllers the only thing I need to adapt is the id of the object in the profile array, and the route to the edit controller.

By using this approach, I can easily add objects to the profile, and add templates to display and edit the properties of each object. The only thing I need to do is:

  1. Define the model for the new object
  2. Setup standard routers and controllers based on the already coded mixins
  3. Create the templates

So this is very easy and flexible, which was my motivation to implement this, but I have one worry. Since I am putting together all properties in the Profile model:

App.User = Ember.Mixin.create({
    email : DS.attr('string')
});

App.Company = Ember.Mixin.create({
    vat : DS.attr('string')
});

// To do this, the profile model includes the User and Company mixins,
//   as well as some common properties.
// TODO: Any other way to do this?
App.Profile = DS.Model.extend(App.User, App.Company, {
    name  : DS.attr('string'),
    type  : DS.attr('string')
});

I am worried that when writing back to the server (currently I have only tried with FIXTURES) the properties from the Company object will leak to the User object, and vice versa.

So, the question is: if a model has undefined properties (that is, the data coming from the server does not have those properties) will those properties be sent back to server with null value, when serializing the object, or will they not be set at all in the JSON? Mind you that the properties were not there to start with, but the model has "all possible properties, for all different profile objects".

Maybe there is another way of defining the Profile model, without including all properties of all different objects? I have not been able to do this: if a property is not declared in the model, it can not be used in the template/controller (which is the whole point of defining them in the model, I suppose).

I would also like to hear some generic feedback on the chosen approach. I feel I am bending Ember a bit too much by having all this "bunch of different objects" in a common URL, but I also have the impression that this can reduce the complexity of this part of my application.

A demo can be seen here.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 103

Answers (1)

mavilein
mavilein

Reputation: 11668

First and foremost i have not worked with ember-data, but i am pretty sure that properties that are not defined are also sent to the server. I also think, that this is not a good approach on data modeling. I pretty sure you should rather have subclasses of your App.Profile. I would go for something like this:

App.Profile = DS.Model.extend({
    name  : DS.attr('string'),
    type  : DS.attr('string')
});

App.User = App.Profile.extend({
    email : DS.attr('string'),
    type  : DS.attr('string', {defaultValue : 'user'})
});

App.Company = App.Profile.extend({
    vat : DS.attr('string', {defaultValue : 'company'})
});

I guess you can could have one API-Point for all with this approach also, by just defining an API-Endpoint on the level of App.Profile.

Upvotes: 1

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