Context

In the Google Summer of Code Project "TYPO3 Flow meets Ember.js" we are trying to make the server-side framework TYPO3 Flow and the client-side framework Ember.js (using Ember Data as the persistence layer) work together easily through conventions and a powerful scaffolding mechanism. You can visit our website to see a more detailed concept.

This document gives a short introduction of:

how domain models look like in Flow and Ember Data,
how the REST JSON API is expected to look like (to follow Ember Data conventions),
for which models REST APIs are provided and how.

Overview

The following diagram gives an overview of what components a Ember/Flow app would consist of. Components that are generated (scaffolded) are illustrated with a green background. Components that are provided through our Flow package or are part of ember-data are illustrated with a blue background.

Flow model (server-side)

Let's consider we have a (simplified) model called post (of a blog) that would looks like this on the server-side:

<?php
namespace TYPO3\Blog\Domain\Model;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use TYPO3\Flow\Annotations as Flow;
use MMitasch\Ember\Annotations as Ember;

/**
 * A blog post
 *
 * @Flow\Entity
 * @Ember\Resource
 */
class Post {

  /**
  * @var string
  * @Flow\Validate(type="NotEmpty")
  */
  protected $title;

  /**
  * @var string
  * @Flow\Validate(type="NotEmpty")
  */
  protected $content;

  // getter and setter for each property omitted for simplification purposes
}

?>

Ember Data Model (client-side)

We will then generate the Ember Data model from the server-side semantics through our scaffolding mechanism. That would look like this:

App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
  title: DS.attr('string'),
  content: DS.attr('string')
});

REST JSON API

The Ember RESTAdapter assumes that the URLs and JSON associated with each model are conventional; this means that, if you follow the rules, you will not need to configure the adapter or write any code in order to get started.

We want to provide a REST JSON API that complies to the Ember RESTAdapter conventions.

The Ember RESTAdapter would expect the server-side API to look like this:

Action	HTTP Verb	URL
Find	GET	/posts/123
Find All	GET	/posts
Update	PUT	/posts/123
Create	POST	/posts
Delete	DELETE	/posts/123

The payload for a GET request /posts/123 would look like this:

{
  "post": {
    "title": "Is a Automagical controller cool?",
    "content": "Need to write some proper blog post content here!"
  }
}

For which models are endpoints provided?

There are two ways how we can define that we want to offer an endpoint for a certain model:

Annotation in a Flow Domain Model
Configuration in Ember.yaml

Annotation in Flow Domain Model

You might have noticed that in the comment before the php class definition, there was an Annotation added:

@Ember\Resource

If a model has this added annotation, we will create an REST API for this model.

Configuration in Ember.yaml

Additional to annotations we will provide a possibility to configure it inside a yaml-file. This is necessary as sometimes it might not be possible (eg. third party package) or wanted to add the annotation to the Flow domain model.

manuelmitasch/TYPO3 Flow meets Ember.js Overview.md