Nested URLs for Ember Data's RestAdapter proposal

Ember Data
23

Great initiative! Two things that come to mind: multiple end-points for the same record and non-CRUD actions. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts!

Multiple end-points for the same record

We’ve got use-cases similar to those @bakura mentions: records exist at multiple endpoints.

Filtering encoded in endpoint path

  • /archived
  • /users/2/todos
  • /pending

may all return Todo records (current user, archived; given user; and pending respectively).

This could be reorganized into /todos?filter=archived, /todos?user=2 etc. but I think this is common (the Github API has a few).

Search results

In search, say Elastic Search, the query may contain a json payload, but any updates/writes would go to another endpoint.

Write/read and replication

There may be a read-only replica with data [geographically] closer to the user. E.g. eu.example.com/todos may handle both read and writes, and us.example.com/todos may be read-only.

Possible solution

Perhaps having named endpoints in the adapter would work. With the default one being inferred from the record as it is now. Such that:

  • store.find('todo') => /todos
  • store.find('todo', { endpoint: 'user', userId: 2 }) => /users/2/todos

Naming is tentative, I’m not sure ‘endpoint’ is the ideal word here.

Non-CRUD actions

Don’t know if this falls under the scope of this proposal, but sometimes non-CRUD actions have dedicated endpoints. Here is an example from the Stripe API. We’ve got similar ones in ours.

Our current solution is an out-of-band request, using pushPayload on the response, to update the model state. This works, but being able to define these actions on the adapter would be neat.

Possible Solution

// in router
record.operation('refund');

// in adapter
var ChargeAdapter = RESTAdapter.extend({
  operations: {
    'refund' : { path: '/charges/:id/refund', method: 'put' }
  }
})

Naming is tentative, I’m not sure ‘operation’ is the ideal word here.

For example, the Strips API has a bunch of these (https://stripe.com/docs/api/curl#refund_charge).