Ember-data-relationship-tracker

Track ember data relationships to know if records are dirty.

Problem

isDirty works great on ember data records if any of the attributes have changed. But it doesn't track relationship changes at all. This is because relationships are very complex and it's very hard to know if they are actually dirty or if they've just changed to reflect server state, e.g. because a new related record has been loaded.

Solution

ember-data-relationship-tracker allows you to explicitly mark pieces of code where you might change relationships. This gives you a hasDirtyFields property on your models that lets you know if any attributes or relationships have changed so you can reflect this in your UI.

In order to safely distinguish new versions from the server vs new edits in the client, you must provide a relationshipTrackerVersion field on your model. It can be a computed property or a real field, but it must be a unique value that changes whenever the server provides a new version.

Example

// ../models/post.js
export default class PostModel extends Model {
  @hasMany('comment') comments;
  @attr('version') version;

  // Add alias for relationship tracker 
  @alias('version') relationshipTrackerVersion;
}

// watch a section of code that might change relationships
post.watchRelationship('comments', () => {
  post.set('comments', someComments);
});

post.get('hasDirtyFields'); // true if comments has changed (or any other attribute has changed)

// rollback relationships to previous state
post.rollbackRelationships();

Works for belongsTo and hasMany relationships, and also knows if you set the relationships back to the original state and sets the property to false again.

See the tests for more examples.

Installation

git clone <repository-url> this repository
cd ember-data-relationship-tracker
npm install

Linting

npm run lint:js
npm run lint:js -- --fix

Running tests

ember test – Runs the test suite on the current Ember version
ember test --server – Runs the test suite in "watch mode"
ember try:each – Runs the test suite against multiple Ember versions

Running the dummy application

ember serve
Visit the dummy application at http://localhost:4200.

For more information on using ember-cli, visit https://ember-cli.com/.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

ef4/ember-data-relationship-tracker