EmberFire (Firebase + Ember Data)

EmberFire is an officially supported adapter for using Firebase with Ember Data.

The DS.FirebaseAdapter provides all of the standard DS.Adapter methods and will automatically synchronize the store with Firebase.

Join the Firebase + Ember Google Group to ask technical questions, share apps you've built, and chat with other developers in the community

Installation

<!-- Don't forget to include Ember and its dependencies -->
<script src="http://builds.emberjs.com/canary/ember-data.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/1.0.6/firebase.js"></script>
<script src="emberfire.js"></script>

Usage

To get started, simply create an instance of the DS.FirebaseAdapter in your app:

App.ApplicationAdapter = DS.FirebaseAdapter.extend({
  firebase: new Firebase('https://<my-firebase>.firebaseio.com')
});

You're Firebase data will now be synced with the Ember Data store

You can now interact with the data store as you normally would. For example, calling find() with a specific ID will retrieve that record from Firebase. Additionally, from that point on, every time that record is updated in Firebase, it will automatically be updated in the local data store.

See the Ember documentation for a full list of methods, including ways to create, find, delete and query records.

Relationships

EmberFire can handle relationships in two different ways

Async

Any relationship that is flagged as async: true tells the adapter to fetch the record if it hasn't already been loaded

App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
  comments: DS.hasMany('comment', { async: true })
});

In the App.Post example, comments will be fetched from https://<my-firebase>.firebaseio.com/comments

Here is what the data structure would look in Firebase:

{
  "posts": {
    "-JIzst0Wbx-zjKKNtl8a": {
      "comments": {
        "-JIzsxCt35JEnay7AKY5": true
      }
    }
  },
  "comments": {
    "-JIzsxCt35JEnay7AKY5": {
      "body": "This is a comment"
    }
  }
}

*The IDs used in the example are arbitrary

Embedded

Any relationship that is flagged as embedded: true tells the adapter that the related records have been included in the payload.

Generally, this approach is more complicated and not as widley used, but it has been included to support existing data structures.

App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
  comments: DS.hasMany('comment', { embedded: true })
});

Here is what the data structure would look like in Firebase:

{
  "posts": {
    "-JIzst0Wbx-zjKKNtl8a": {
      "comments": {
        "-JIzsxCt35JEnay7AKY5": {
          "body": "This is a comment"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

NOTE: When a modal has embedded relationships, the related model can't be saved on it's own.

var comment = store.createRecords('comment');
// This won't work because the adapter doesn't know
// where to save the comment without the context of the post
comment.save();

Instead, the comment needs to be added to the post and then the post can be saved

// Add the new comment to the post and save it
post.get('comments').addObject(comment);
// Saving the post will then save the embedded comments
post.save()

Development

If you would like to build EmberFire from the source, use grunt to build and lint the code:

# Install Grunt and development dependencies
npm install

# Default task - validates with jshint and minifies source
grunt

# Watch for changes and run unit test after each change
grunt watch

# Minify source
grunt build

License

MIT.