Ember observer not working on nested property - ember.js

I have created a mock application to illustrate the situation I am facing: Mock App
In this application; I have created a service with a single boolean property and a function to toggle that property (x); and two components (one to toggle the service's property; the other to observe the number of toggles and display it). The observer lies in toggle-observer. It is added directly to service's property as: myService.x. The code is not working as is; however if the comment at line 14 of toggle-observer.js is commented out; the observer starts working.
My question is that, do I need to perform a get to the whole path of a nested observer property to get it working? Is this the expected behavior? If so, can somebody explain why? My best regards.
Note: This is a mock example to illustrate the case; it is not related to anything I am designing in a real app. I am trying to avoid observers as much as possible; but I ran into this situation while trying out sth. and decided to ask it.

From ember guide service
Injected properties are lazy loaded; meaning the service will not be
instantiated until the property is explicitly called. Therefore you
need to access services in your component using the get function
otherwise you might get an undefined.
From ember guide, unconsumed computed properties do not trigger observers.
By combining the above two concepts, we can come to the below conclusion,
You haven't used myService any of the property inside toggle-observer component so it will be undefined until you explicitly call get function or use it in template.
Unless you use it x property in toggle-observer component, then it will not trigger observer. You need to consume it either in toggle-observer.hbs file or in init method.

Related

What is the difference between set(this, 'agentName', 'John') and this.set('agentName', 'John') in Ember?

The same is true for 'get' methods too. Like get(this, 'agentName') and this.get('agentName') returns the same value.
In the official ember doc for get method, it shows that we are supposed to pass 2 values to get. Then how does this.get('agentName') work accurately?
this.get(...) is a shortcut for Ember.get(this,...). However it is only available on ember objects, so only Ember.get works in plain js objects.
Have a look at this.get(...) implementation.
The getter and setter in Ember has been upgraded to handle unknown property, computed property and observers. Not many people would use setUnknownProperty() hook or the unknownProperty() hook with get and set, but there are computed properties and observers throughout most people's code. More on computed properties and observers.
So, the basic difference between your set() and this.set() has to do with the context of your function. When you call just set(), it has to be defined in that scope or imported from somewhere to get things done. Howeve, with this.set() the scope here is this. Depending on where you are calling the function the scope changes. For instance if you are in a component, this refers to the component class itself. Similar would be the case with controllers, routes and other ember objects. If you have object of your own and it does not extend any of ember classes, then this would still work with how it does in any other JavaScript code. So it will fall back to default getter and setter in JavaScript.
As you may have realized by now, when you call get(this, 'foo'), you are calling JavaScript's getter function and pass it the current context with property to be searched for. And when you say this.get('foo') you are calling get() from Ember.Object class, which can handle things I mentioned above. And as #Lux mentioned this.get('foo') is simplified to call Ember.get(this, 'foo').
Hope this helps. I do encourage reading Ember guides and API docs. Curent ember-cli and ember-data version is #2.12.0

Ember JS automatically register directory classes to DI

Creating in-repo-addon in Ember.JS gives a lot of possibilities. Today I've stumbled into a case when I wanted to register all classes in directory (for example my-dir) into Dependency Injector (same way it's done with services by Ember, but I wanted to use some other namespace).
For example I want to allow developer to create multiple classes inside proxy directory, and register all of them in DI under proxy: namespace. So later we can use:
Ember.Component.extend({
myProxy: Ember.inject('proxy:my'),
});
You'll need to do this using an initializer. More details on this here: https://guides.emberjs.com/v2.12.0/applications/dependency-injection/
The hard part may be getting all proxy items in s folder to automatically register ...
Edit
Looks like I didn't spend enough time thinking about this. You should be able to do at least part of this easily. There are two parts to this.
Part 1
Ember currently uses the ember-resolver to handle lookups for various items. If you check the tests for the resolver you'll notice that you should be able to map in anything you want: https://github.com/ember-cli/ember-resolver/blob/master/tests/unit/resolvers/classic/basic-test.js
So in your case, if you do a Ember.getOwner(this).lookup('proxy:main') from within an Ember instantiated class (a route, controller or component for instance) it would look in app/proxy/main.js which your addon could be populating.
Details on the Ember.getOwner lookup are available here: https://emberjs.com/api/classes/Ember.html#method_getOwner
Part 2
So at this point you can lookup proxies (which would be doable in an init method). But if we want to get truly elegant we'd want to allow Ember.inject.proxy('main') syntax.
Doing so would involve calling a private method inside of Ember.inject in an initializer. Because that naming scheme is changing in the new Javascript modules RFC, it may be unwise to try to add this syntactic sugar ...
So I'd advise avoiding touching that private API unless it's really important to your app design.

TextField View Helper - Ember.Handlebars.helpers.view.call is not a function

I'm working on upgrading my grunt CLI based ember 1.8 app to 1.10 with HTMLbars & have made progress, but my view helpers and components don't work; such as date-input, ember-select, bing-map, product-item. So I'm starting with the date-input view helper which returns this error now - "Ember.Handlebars.helpers.view.call is not a function". This input control is rendered via {{date-input... which is associated to 'DateInputView' in views/date-input.js which extends Ember.TextField. It's also associated to helpers/date-input.js and Ember.Handlebars.makeBoundHelper(). The function inside returns Ember.Handlebars.helpers.view.call() which results in the error. I read something about how maybe my template compiler isn't the new one required or maybe a Component should be used rather than a View Helper, but it seems like there should be a simple fix for the View Helper, don't you think?
Development of this viewHelper was done by another party and the purpose of the callback making a call to viewHelper is a mystery. Regardless, the use of viewHelpers is being discouraged going forward and I've re-worked the date-input as a Component.

Idiomatic way to use __container__.lookupFactory in Ember.js

In the notes of this commit, the Ember team have made it very clear that App.__container__.lookup() is not the way to get at controllers. Instead we should use the needs property.
I understand the rationale behind this, and the idiomatic way to access singleton controllers.
However, in my app, I have some cases where I need instance controllers. In that case, I am using App.__container__.lookupFactory() to get at the prototype which I can then create() or extend()
Is there a better way to do this (without using __container__?
Edit:
Here is an example use case.
App.MyContainerView = Ember.ContainerView.extend
...
addChildView: ->
#get("content").pushObject(App.MyChildView.create(...))
The above example will push a new view onto the stack (allowing views to be dynamically created)
However, these views will (may?) not have the right container (and other properties?) set due to being created using App.MyChildView.create(). This is especially true in cases where we are doing a partial integration of Ember into an existing app.
The way to create these views would instead be:
App.__container__.lookupFactory("view:my_child").create()
In which case everything would be ok.
Additional use cases exist, for creating instance controllers outside the context of the router.. but the idea is the same.
I don't know if you're still looking for an answer. I am also struggling with how to do things "the Ember way".
This answer put me on the right track, and should be relevant to your question:
"Please ensure this controller was instantiated with a container"
As for me, I had the same problem as in the above question: when I manually instantiated my App.AnyOtherController with App.AnyOtherController.create(...), then inside this controller, I could not access dependency injections (such as a session object that I make available to all my controllers and routes).
Instantiating the same controller this way solves the problem by giving the controller a container:
this.container.lookupFactory('controller:any_other').create(...)
You should be able to access this.container from any view, and I guess, any controller, as long as they have been given a container.
You can Ember.String.decamelize('AnyOther') to convert the CamelCase controller name to a suitable string.
More on containers here: http://ember.zone/beginning-to-understand-the-ember-js-container/
If it doesn't help you, I still hope this helps someone out there, as this container stuff is a bit tricky at first...

EmberJS - A way to log undefined bindings

Is there a way to get Ember to log a warning or error if you reference a property that doesn't exist? Currently if you misspell a the name of a property bound in your handlebar template there is no warning, it just doesn't show anything, and it can be hard to find which property is incorrect.
I have LOG_BINDINGS enabled, which helps somewhat, but there is a lot of unrelated stuff to sort through.
There isn't any sort of general built-in debugging that I have found, but there is a mechanism to add your own.
Ember.Object calls a method 'unknownProperty' any time a 'get' call returns undefined. You can add a console.warn to this method to log the property. The documentation describes it as a way to make custom abstract method type handling.
http://emberjs.com/api/classes/Ember.Observable.html#method_get
Ember.Object.reopen(
unknownProperty: (property) ->
unless property is 'App' or property is 'Ember'
console.warn "Unknown property #{property} in #{#toString()}"
)
Notice the filtering of the global namespaces 'App' and 'Ember' - all calls to global properties still go through this interface, but for what we care about they are red herrings.
Unfortunately, if you try to do this by reopening Ember.Object itself, you get a bunch of junk you don't care about, because apparently this happens all the time, especially in the EventManager classes. I have gotten around this by applying it to Ember.ArrayController, Ember.ObjectController, and a Model class that all of my models inherit from.
I now get a neat warning message on the console instead of a blank page every time I accidentally type "hight" into handlebars instead of "height"
In a production solution one would want to link this to some kind of "debug" option in the build, I assume.
One half solution might be to use the log handlebars helper to log the property before using it, unfortunately a non existent property causes the template to not display at all. This is a common problem with handlebars not displaying errors.
{{log myProperty}}