Ember Communication Between Components - ember.js

Question

I'm developing a webapp to display and search documents. I've laid out the main wrapper div like this:
<div class="wrapper">
{{searchComponent searchComponent=searchComponent}}
{{pdfViewer pdfSearchComponent=searchComponent}}
</div>
This allows me to later add other types of viewers in there, like so:
{{otherViewer otherSearchComponent=searchComponent}}
The outer wrapper is an ember component as well. So it's controller looks like:
Ember.controller.extend({
searchComponent: null,
.
.
otherProperties,
actions: { }
});
And the searching component binds itself on itialization, as inspired from this source: http://www.samselikoff.com/blog/getting-ember-components-to-respond-to-actions/
Ember.controller.extend({
searchComponent: null,
.
.
onStart: function(){
this.searchComponent = this;
}.on('init'),
.
.
actions: {
someAction: function() {
//do something
}
}
}
So I can now reference the component from the main pdfViewer like this:
this.get('searchComponent').send('someAction')
To get the response, right now I bind another property to all the controllers / templates, and then watch for a change on that property in the viewer controller, after which I can place the results where they need to be.
Is there a way to send a 'message' from my 'pdfViewer' to my 'searchComponent' and receive a 'response' without explicitly binding them together, as above?

Answer 1

You could consider using pub/sub through a Service event bus, in which your searchComponent and pdfViewer both emit and listen for messages, so can talk to each other. Sure, there is a dependency on the service, but from what I see your components are pretty application-specific anyway.
Something like:
_listen: function() {
this.get('eventBus').on('message', this, 'handleMessage');
}.on('init'),
actions: {
click() { this.get('eventBus').trigger('message', message); }
}
A few weeks ago I evaluated several approaches to parent-children component communication: http://emberigniter.com/parent-to-children-component-communication/, perhaps this helps somewhat.