Ember Data v1.0.0-beta.15 Released

Feb 14, 2015 – By Brendan McLoughlin

We are pleased to announce the release Ember Data 1.0.0-beta.15. It includes many bug fixes as well as several new features. As always this release can be obtained from npm (for use with ember-cli), rubygems, or bower. The builds are also available as static files at emberjs.com/builds

The 1.0.0-beta.15 release represents the effort of at least 30 contributors across over 168 commits.

Improvements

Snapshot API

In Ember Data serializers will now be given a snapshot instance instead of a record instance when serializing records. A snapshot represents the frozen state of a record at a particular moment in time. Its initial purpose is to be passed to serializers instead of the real record. This allows the serializer to examine the current state of that record in the moment without triggering side-effects, like loading relationships.

The snapshot has a different API from a record for accessing properties so you will know you are working with a snapshot. Using snapshot.get is still supported for compatibility however it will log a deprecated warning to encourage you to use the new apis.

To access attributes you should now use the attr function.

// Ember Data 1.0.0-beta.14.1
post.get('title');
// Ember Data 1.0.0-beta.15
postSnapshot.attr('title');

To access a belongsTo relationship you should use .belongsTo() method.

// Ember Data 1.0.0-beta.14.1
post.get('author');
// Ember Data 1.0.0-beta.15
postSnapshot.belongsTo('author');

To access a hasMany relationship you should use .hasMany() method.

// Ember Data 1.0.0-beta.14.1
post.get('comments');
// Ember Data 1.0.0-beta.15
postSnapshot.hasMany('comments');

Please give a warm thanks to Christoffer Persson for all his work implementing this feature!

Errors on arbitrary properties

Previously, Ember Data would only attach errors to a record's error object if they matched a property that was already on the record. Now thanks to Alex Speller's work any error returned by the backend can be attached to the error object.

Please note that if your backend is returning an error property that is not an attribute on the record you will need to manually clear it before the record can transition out of the error state.

Sort query params in ajax calls.

When developing APIs, it is common to use a caching mechanism, like Varnish, to cache requests to public API endpoints, and those tools use the URL string to determine if they have a cached response.

As an example, if one user requests /posts?sort=price&category=pets and another requests /posts?category=pets&sort=price, the cached request won't be used in the second call.

Ember Data's RESTAdapter will now sort the query parameters by their field name when making an ajax request.

It is possible to disable this behavior, by setting sortQueryParams to be false on your adapter.

App.ApplicationAdapter = DS.RESTAdapter.extend({
  namespace: 'api/v1',
  sortQueryParams: false
});

Thanks to Miguel Camba for implementing this feature.