Customizing Adapters

The JSONAPIAdapter has a handful of hooks that are commonly used to extend it to work with non-standard backends.

The JSONAPIAdapter is smart enough to determine the URLs it communicates with based on the name of the model. For example, if you ask for a Post by ID:

store.findRecord('post', 1).then(function(post) {
});

The JSON:API adapter will automatically send a GET request to /posts/1.

The actions you can take on a record map onto the following URLs in the JSON:API adapter:

To facilitate pluralizing model names when generating route URLs Ember Data comes bundled with Ember Inflector, an ActiveSupport::Inflector compatible library for inflecting words between plural and singular forms. Irregular or uncountable pluralizations can be specified via Ember.Inflector.inflector.

To do this, create an Initializer file containing your customizations. The Ember CLI's initializer generator can be used ember generate initializer custom-inflector-rules to create the file. Update its content as follows:

import Inflector from 'ember-inflector';

export function initialize(/* application */) {
  const inflector = Inflector.inflector;

  // Tell the inflector that the plural of "campus" is "campuses"
  inflector.irregular('campus', 'campuses');

  // Tell the inflector that the plural of "advice" is "advice"
  inflector.uncountable('advice');
}

export default {
  name: 'custom-inflector-rules',
  initialize
};

The JSON:API adapter will now make requests for Campus models to /campuses and /campuses/1 (instead of /campus/ and /campus/1), and requests for advice to /advice and /advice/1 (instead of /advices/ and /advices/1).

When specifying irregular inflection rules for compound words, only the final word or phrase should be specified. For example, to specify the plural of redCow as redKine or red-cow as red-kine, only the final word segments cow and kine should be specified:

inflector.irregular('cow', 'kine');

The namespace property can be used to prefix requests with a specific URL namespace.

import JSONAPIAdapter from '@ember-data/adapter/json-api';

export default class ApplicationAdapter extends JSONAPIAdapter {
  namespace = 'api/1';
}

Requests for person would now target https://api.emberjs.com/api/1/people/1.

By default, the adapter will target the current domain. If you would like to specify a new domain you can do so by setting the host property on the adapter.

import JSONAPIAdapter from '@ember-data/adapter/json-api';

export default class ApplicationAdapter extends JSONAPIAdapter {
  host = 'https://api.example.com';
}

Requests for person would now target https://api.example.com/people/1.

By default, the JSONAPIAdapter will attempt to pluralize and dasherize the model name to generate the path name. If this convention does not conform to your backend you can override the pathForType method.

For example, if you did not want to pluralize model names and needed underscore_case instead of dash-case you could override the pathForType method like this:

import JSONAPIAdapter from '@ember-data/adapter/json-api';
import { underscore } from '@ember/string';

export default class ApplicationAdapter extends JSONAPIAdapter {
  pathForType(type) {
    return underscore(type);
  }
}

Requests for person would now target /person/1. Requests for user-profile would now target /user_profile/1.

Some APIs require HTTP headers, e.g. to provide an API key. Arbitrary headers can be set as key/value pairs on the JSONAPIAdapter's headers object and Ember Data will send them along with each ajax request.

import JSONAPIAdapter from '@ember-data/adapter/json-api';

export default class ApplicationAdapter extends JSONAPIAdapter {
  headers = {
    'API_KEY': 'secret key',
    'ANOTHER_HEADER': 'Some header value'
  };
}

You can combine tracked properties with ES6 getters to make headers dynamic. For example, you may have a session service with a tracked property called authToken:

import JSONAPIAdapter from '@ember-data/adapter/json-api';
import { service } from '@ember/service';

export default class ApplicationAdapter extends JSONAPIAdapter {
  @service session;

  get headers() {
    return {
      'API_KEY': this.session.authToken,
      'ANOTHER_HEADER': 'Some header value'
    };
  }
}

Getters recompute with each access, so you could just as easily rely upon another dynamic value such as document.cookie.

import JSONAPIAdapter from '@ember-data/adapter/json-api';
import { get } from '@ember/object';

export default class ApplicationAdapter extends JSONAPIAdapter {
  get headers() {
    return {
      'API_KEY': get(document.cookie.match(/apiKey\=([^;]*)/), '1'),
      'ANOTHER_HEADER': 'Some header value'
    };
  }
}

If none of the built-in Ember Data Adapters work for your backend, be sure to check out some of the community maintained Ember Data Adapters. Some good places to look for Ember Data Adapters include:

• Ember Observer
• GitHub