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

Using The Adapter With Traditional Script Tages:

1. Copy the javascript files from dist/global/ember-data-tastypie-adapter.js and place them on your webserver.

2. Insert the script tags into your document that link to the javascript files you copied to your webserver after your ember-data script tag.

   <script type="javascript" src="path/to/your/files/ember-data-tastypie-adapter.js"

3. Setup the tastypie adapter and serializer for usage in ember.

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

Note: You can also add any parameters available in the default RESTAdapter and RESTSerializer in ember. See http://emberjs.com/api/data/classes/DS.RESTAdapter.html and http://emberjs.com/api/data/classes/DS.RESTSerializer.html fur full configuration details. An example is shown below.

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

Using in Ember-CLI as a global module:

1. Add an import statement to your brocfile.js.

   app.import('vendor/ember-data-tastypie-adapter/dist/global/ember-data-tastypie-adapter.js');

2. Add the 2 entries required to make jshint happy to the predef section of your .jshintrc file.

       "DjangoTastypieAdapter": true,
       "DjangoTastypieSerializer": true

3. Setup your app/adapters/application.js file for usage with the tastypie adapter.

   import DS from "ember-data";
   
   export default DS.DjangoTastypieAdapter.extend();

4. Setup your app/serializers/application.js file for usage with the tastypie serializer.

   import DS from "ember-data";
   
   export default DS.DjangoTastypieSerializer.extend();

Note: You can also add any parameters available in the default RESTAdapter and RESTSerializer in ember. See http://emberjs.com/api/data/classes/DS.RESTAdapter.html and http://emberjs.com/api/data/classes/DS.RESTSerializer.html fur full configuration details. An example is shown below.

```javascript
import DS from "ember-data";

export default 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:

1. 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

2. Tastypie comes setup by default to only allow GET operations. To allow write access (POST, PUT, Delete) to your api django-tastypie will require an Authorization meta option. For more detailed information see the tastypie documentation on Authorization. An insecure configuration is shown below:

   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:

    1. Tastypie resources must not use full=True in the relationship fields.
    2. 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:

    1. Tastypie resources must use full=True in the relationship fields.
    2. 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.

Building

Note: To build minified .js files you need to have BROCCOLI_ENV="production" and EMBER_ENV="production" in your environment at build time.

To build, go to the project folder you downloaded the source to and type:

npm install
bower install
broccoli build dist

Unit tests

Browser

Go to the project directory and type:

testem

Go to http://localhost:7357/ to run the Qunit tests.

Terminal (PhantomJS)

# Run once
testem ci

Versions

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

ember.js

1.8.1

ember-data

1.0.0-beta.11

Contributors

• Diego Muñoz Escalante
• Pepe Cano
• olofsj
• Mitchel Kelonye
• Dzmitry Dzemidzenka
• Pedro Kiefer
• Alex Goodwin
• Aaron Ghent
• Sander Steffann
• Sunny Nanda
• Shaun Davis

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2014 Diego Muñoz Escalante