cgcardona

Notes from the 'Optimizing Your API for Ember Data' session

Speaker

Dan Gebhardt

Summary

We don't always have the luxury of designing an application's front and back ends together. However, when we do, it makes sense to mesh them as closely as possible. This talk will focus on optimizing a backend API for use with Ember Data.

Ember Data has been steadily expanding its capabilities in the past year. It now supports a number of different data relationships, embedded and "side loaded" data, and even bulk commit operations. Serializers and mappings help translate between your API and your Ember models. This talk will explore front and back end code that illustrates these capabilities.

Because Ember Data features "out-of-the-box support for Rails apps that follow the activemodelserializers gem's conventions", the examples in this talk will utilize activemodelserializers to build an API. However, the examples will focus on API endpoints and therefore be easily translatable to other tech stacks.

Convention over configuration

Trivial choices are the enemy - Yehuda Katz

My making our API as conventional as possible we can reduce friction on our team and make our APIs easier to consume.

Tech stack

Client

Ember.js

Server

Rails with ActiveModel::Serializers

ActiveModel::Serializers

  • "what" not "how"
  • DRY
  • Customizable

Ember Data

  • In memory store
  • Canonical records
  • Multi-layered architecture
  • Customizable adapters/serializers

AM::S Conventions

  • underscore_naming
  • include root element
  • id: 1, fkid: 1, fkids: [1]
  • conventions for including related data

DS.RESTAdapter Conventions

  • underscore_naming
  • include root element
  • id: 1, fkid: 1, fkids: [1]
  • conventions for including related data

Identical to ActiveModel::Serializers

A sprinkle of configuration

class ApplicationSericalizer < ActiveModel::Sericalizer
  # sideload related data by default
  embed :ids, include: true
end

Relationships

One-to-Many relationships

... code Ember.js, rails, and JSON examples

One-to-None relationships

... code Ember.js, rails, and JSON examples

Many-to-Many relationships

... code Ember.js, rails, and JSON examples

Many-to-None relationships

... code Ember.js, rails, and JSON examples

Embedded Relationships

Serialized Embedded Data

... code rails, and JSON examples

Embedded Read-only Data

... code Ember.js example

Customizations

Custom Pluralization

... code JSON example

Custom Keys

... code JSON example

Custom Sideloading

... code Ember.js and JSON examples

Custom Transforms

Let you define your own types of data.

... code Ember.js example

Custom URLs

... code Ember.js example

Buld Commits

... code Ember.js example

Edge of Convention

Each of these is easy for us to solve in our own domain but hard to standardize on.

  • Pagination
  • Authentication
  • Sparse fieldsets
  • Custom icnludes
  • Polymorphism

Resources

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Published

15 February 2013

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