Belongs to relationship id not in sync with relation object

Ember Data
1

I’m fairly new to ember and ember-data and have been struggling with what is the correct approach towards handling ids on belongsTo associations.

A simple setup of my problem would be

var Parent = DS.Model.extend({});
var Child = DS.Model.extend({
  parent: DS.belongsTo('parent', {async: true}),
  parentId: DS.attr() // also tried adding this
});

I would like to access the parentId instead of loading the entire model in some situations but in others I would like to access the parent object. The problem is get(‘parentId’) is not always equal to get(‘parent.id’). I’ve thought of implementing synchronization but this seems like a functionality that may be built in. Am I missing something here?

example access scenario

childInstance = this.store.createRecord('child', {parent: parentInstance});
childInstance.get('parentId') === childInstance.get('parent.id'); //=> false

OR

childInstance = this.store.find('child', childId);
childInstance.get('parent').then(function(){
  childInstance.get('parentId') === childInstance.get('parent.id'); //=> false
});

I had trouble setting this up with fixtures so no JSBin for this one

2

The minimum required:

var Item = DS.Model.extend({
  children: DS.hasMany('item', { async: true }),
  parentId: DS.attr('string')
});

Better to instead have:

var Item = DS.Model.extend({
  children: DS.hasMany('item', { inverse: 'parent' }),
  parent: DS.belongsTo('item', { inverse: 'children'}),

  // parentId can stay on model as an attribute:
  parentId: DS.attr('string')

  // else you can apply a computed value that exists only
  // on the client - ie: won't be saved to server
  parentId: Ember.computed('parent', function() {
      var parent = this.get('parent');
      return parent.get('id');
  })
});

For future reference, this is called recursive association. Will help for future web searches.