mock-fake.md

Mock-Fake

Purpose

Add new command to ember-cli to speed up prototyping out a new idea like this:

ember generate mock-fake post --fields="title:string, body:string, comment:hasMany, author:belongsTo" 

With that one command you will have everything you need to fake a backend for your ember app.

Explanation

The command would generate a few files

app/models/post.js

import DS from 'ember-data';

export default DS.Model.extend({
    title: DS.attr('string'),
    body: DS.attr('string'),
    comments: DS.hasMany('comment'),
    author: DS.belongsTo('author')
});

So it generates a model file and populates the attributes for you. Relationships are listed in the singular/plural form based on the relationship type.

server/mocks/posts.js

module.exports = function(app) {
  var express = require('express');
  var faker = require('faker');
  var postsRouter = express.Router();
  var POSTS = function(iterations) {
    p = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < iterations; i++) {
      p[i] = {
        id: i+1,
        title: faker.lorem.sentence(),
        body: faker.lorem.sentence),
        comments: [1],
        author: 1
      }
    };
    return p;
  }
  postsRouter.get('/', function(req, res) {
    res.send({
      'posts': POSTS(9)
    });
  });
 //... 

A few things to notice:

1. It imported the faker library

var faker = require('faker');

2. then creates a POSTS variable that generates the fake date based on the --fields that was passed in the command. Relationships are listed in the singular/plural form based on the relationship type.

var POSTS = function(iterations) {
    p = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < iterations; i++) {
      p[i] = {
        id: i+1,
        title: faker.lorem.sentence(),
        body: faker.lorem.sentence),
        comments: [1],
        author: 1
      }
    };
    return p;
  }

3. and finally, we reference that variable so that when api/posts is called, it will return the fake data

 postsRouter.get('/', function(req, res) {
  res.send({
    'posts': POSTS(9)
  });
});

Thoughts?

It also goes without saying that it will also generate the necessary tests.