Accepted practice to reset a bunch of controllers - ember.js

Question

In several situations in my App I need to reset a bunch of controllers (in ajax replies, ...). This happens at different points in the application, so I do not have always a route/controller/view available. I want to have a single easy-to-use function to reset everything, no parameters needed.
This is what I am trying to replace (very old version of ember):
function resetApp() {
Dashboard.router.totalCallsController.set("content", 0);
Dashboard.router.totalMinutesController.set("content", 0);
Dashboard.router.callDurationAvgController.set("content", 0);
};
And now I am doing:
function resetApp() {
var container = Dashboard.__container__;
container.lookup('controller:totalCalls').set("content", 0);
container.lookup('controller:totalMinutes').set("content", 0);
container.lookup('controller:callDurationAvg').set("content", 0);
}
But according to this answer the container should not be used for that. How can I get a controller if I only have access to the application object? Before it was just easy: in Dasboard.router we could access all controllers directly. Now only via the container, but this is not advised, and probably will change (API is n flux). So what can I do?

Answer 1

If you're going for the most Emberish way, but want the function to live outside of Ember, I would suggest the observer pattern. In an essence anytime a controller is created you subscribe it to the global reset function. There are a few ways to accomplish this, I'd probably do it with a mixin.
Here's a small example:
App.ResettableMixin = Em.Mixin.create({
init: function(){
this._super();
App.Resettable.join(this.get('resetMe'), this);
}
});
App.IndexController = Em.ArrayController.extend(App.ResettableMixin,{
resetMe: function(){
console.log('reset index controller');
}
});
App.FooController = Em.ObjectController.extend(App.ResettableMixin,{
resetMe: function(){
console.log('reset foo controller ' + this.get('model'));
}
});
App.Resettable = {
resetters: [],
join: function(methodToCall, context){
this.resetters.push({method: methodToCall, context:context});
},
reset: function(){
var item;
console.log('resetting ' + this.resetters.length + ' items');
for(var i = 0, len = this.resetters.length; i<len;i++){
item = this.resetters[i];
item.method.apply(item.context);
}
},
remove: function(methodToFind){
// iterate through find, and remove it from resetters
}
};
http://emberjs.jsbin.com/hudugene/4/edit