ember-flexure

Flexure is a library for helping you manage data and communicate with servers in Ember.js.

It's designed to fill the niche between when Ember Data is too heavy or opinionated for your needs, but raw ajax and javascript objects are not enough.

Its primary goal is to help you get your data into Ember objects that you can do useful things with, like define computed properties or manage simple relationships.

Differences from Ember Data

• There is no identity map.
• There are no inverse relationships.
• Instead of abstracting away your interaction with the server, you are expected to semantically define your interactions.

Installing

A bower component is forthcoming.

You should be using the new Ember resolver, preferably via ember-cli.

Models

Defining models

To define a model, create subclass EF.Model. For example,

// app/models/person.js

export default EF.Model.extend({
  name: EF.attr("string"),
  hobbies: EF.hasMany("hobby"),
  isNice: EF.attr("boolean", {default: true}),

  isNotNice: Ember.computed.not("isNice"),
});


// app/models/hobby.js

export default EF.Model.extend({
  name: EF.attr("string"),
  skill: EF.attr("number"),
});

Using models

In Ember Data, you would pull your models out of the store. Flexure, on the other hand, does not have an identity map; the term "store" didn't feel right. Flexure instead provides Models, a utility class for creating model instances.

This object is automatically injected into your routes and controllers as the models property.

As a basic example,

// app/routes/index.js

export default Ember.Route.extend({
  model: function() {
    this.models.make("person", {
      name: "Jereth",
      isNice: false,
      hobbies: [
        {
          name: "Ruling Goblins",
          skill: 7,
        },
        {
          name: "Babysitting",
          skill: 0,
        },
        {
          name: "Hair",
          skill: 10,
        },
      ]
    });
  }
});

Note that the objects under hobbies will automatically be converted into instances of model:hobby, as defined in the previous section.

Models also provide basic support for managing:

• serializing
• error states

Interacting with the server

Flexure also provides a utility object for communicating with your server. To define it, subclass EF.API and register it as api:application. This object is automatically injected into your routes and controllers, and has access to Models.

// app/apis/application.js

export default EF.API.extend({
  host: "//api.mydomain.com",

  headers: {
    "X-My-Auth-Token": "xxxx"
  }

  findPerson: function(name) {
    var models = this.models;

    return this.request({
      type: "GET", //default
      path: "person/" + name,
    }).then(function(data) {
      return models.make("person", data);
    });
  }

});

License

MIT License.