What can you do with Ember Data Models when in the error state?

Question

I\'m struggling to understand the workflow that would be used in the following scenario:

A user creates a model, let\'s call it Product. We present them with a form

Answer 1

So after a few days of reading source and experimenting, I have come to the conclusion that this is functionality that is not yet implemented. To move a record into another state you are supposed to send an event to it which passes it on the statemanager. There appears to be no events registered on the error state that allows us to recover the record.

There is an ugly workaround - I can call transitionTo on the statemanager of the record and force it into the state we want. I did not decide to do this lightly, but at this point I must continue on with the project while I wait for ember-data to evolve. So if the record is so far unsaved, we can rescue it from an invalid or error state by calling:

model.get('stateManager').transitionTo('loaded.created.uncommitted')

or for an existing record:

model.get('stateManager').transitionTo('loaded.updated')

Once this has been called, you can attempt to call commit again on the transaction that the model resides in. This will be the default transaction as the behaviour of ember-data is to move a model into the default transaction once commit has been called on it's original transaction. You can always retrieve the current transaction for a model by calling model.get('transaction')

So at the end of this, I have a way to create the typical CRUD scenario that we might see in Ruby on Rails, but I don't believe this is the ideal way to do it. I do believe however that at this point in time, neither does the ember-data team.

For those of you interested in having CRUD functionality as controller and route mixins for Ember, I have a Gist that contains the code I cam currently using. This is working fine, recovers from save errors as well as validation errors. Hopefully I can continue to refine this as ember-data evolves.

Answer 2

You could try creating a parallel representation of the model as an Ember.Object that is not persisted but has the same properties as your persisted model. If your ajax bounces back in an error state you can use the error callback provided by the ajax method to do something.

In this case, the "something" might be to delete the record, and then clone the properties from your dummy object into a new record and re-save the record. On a success callback simply destroy your temp object and if all records are clean then clear your temp objects (to prevent lingering temp objects).

This could also be insane... but it strikes me as an option.

Answer 3

You can trigger a becameValid event on it:

record.send("becameValid");

This should transition the model to uncommitted state.

Answer 4

With the addition of DS.Errors in 1.0.0-beta5 (see https://github.com/emberjs/data/commit/994f3b234ef899b79138ddece60d8b214c5449e3) you should be able to call...

record.get("errors").clear();

This will clear out the previous errors and triggers becameValid.