emberfire

EmberFire (Firebase + Ember Data)

EmberFire is the officially supported adapter for using Firebase with Ember Data.

The DS.FirebaseAdapter provides all of the standard DS.Adapter methods and will automatically synchronize the store with Firebase.

If you would like to use Firebase without Ember Data, we recommend the third-party ember-firebase binding.

Join the Firebase + Ember Google Group to ask technical questions, share apps you've built, and chat with other developers in the community.

Downloading EmberFire

In order to use EmberFire in your project, you need to include the following files in your HTML:

<!-- Ember + Ember Data -->
<script src="http://builds.emberjs.com/canary/ember.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://builds.emberjs.com/canary/ember-data.min.js"></script>

<!-- Firebase -->
<script src="https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/1.0.17/firebase.js"></script>

<!-- EmberFire -->
<script src="https://cdn.firebase.com/libs/emberfire/1.1.2/emberfire.min.js"></script>

Use the URL above to download both the minified and non-minified versions of EmberFire from the Firebase CDN. You can also download them from the /dist/ directory of this GitHub repository. Firebase and Ember can be downloaded directly from their respective websites.

You can also install EmberFire via Bower and the dependencies will be downloaded automatically:

$ bower install emberfire --save

Getting Started with Firebase

EmberFire requires Firebase in order to sync data. You can sign up here for a free account.

Usage

To get started, simply create an instance of the DS.FirebaseAdapter in your app:

App.ApplicationAdapter = DS.FirebaseAdapter.extend({
  firebase: new Firebase('https://<my-firebase>.firebaseio.com')
});

Your Firebase data will now be synced with the Ember Data store

You can now interact with the data store as you normally would. For example, calling find() with a specific ID will retrieve that record from Firebase. Additionally, from that point on, every time that record is updated in Firebase, it will automatically be updated in the local data store.

See the Ember documentation for a full list of methods, including ways to create, find, delete and query records.

Ember CLI

EmberFire also works with the Ember CLI. Run the following command to add emberfire.js to your project:

$ npm install --save emberfire

Then, all you need to do is create app/adapters/application.js with the following content:

/* globals Firebase */

export default DS.FirebaseAdapter.extend({
  firebase: new Firebase('https://<my-firebase>.firebaseio.com')
});

Data Structure

By default, EmberFire will try to determine the correct Firebase reference based on the model name

// Define a Post model
App.Post = DS.Model.extend();

// Records will be fetched from to https://<my-firebase>.firebaseio.com/posts
var posts = store.findAll('post');

// The new record will be saved to https://<my-firebase>.firebaseio.com/posts/post_id
var newPost = store.createRecord('post').save();

What if my data is named differently?

If you would like to customize where a model will be fetched/saved, simply create a model-specific adapter:

// Define a Post model
App.Post = DS.Model.extend();

// Define a Post adapter
App.PostAdapter = App.ApplicationAdapter.extend({
  pathForType: function(type) {
    return 'custom-posts';
  }
});

Overriding the pathForType method will allow you to tell the adapter where it should fetch/save records of the specified type

// Records will now be fetched from to https://<my-firebase>.firebaseio.com/custom-posts
var posts = store.findAll('post');

// The new record will now be saved to https://<my-firebase>.firebaseio.com/custom-posts/post_id
var newPost = store.createRecord('post').save();

Relationships

EmberFire can handle relationships in two different ways: async and embedded.

Async

Any relationship that is flagged as async: true tells the adapter to fetch the record if it hasn't already been loaded

App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
  comments: DS.hasMany('comment', { async: true })
});

App.Comment = DS.Model.extend({
  post: DS.belongsTo('post', { async: true })
});

In the App.Post example, comments will be fetched from https://<my-firebase>.firebaseio.com/comments

Here is what the data structure would look in Firebase:

{
  "posts": {
    "post_id_1": {
      "comments": {
        "comment_id_1": true
      }
    }
  },

  "comments": {
    "comment_id_1": {
      "body": "This is a comment",
      "post": "post_id_1"
    }
  }
}

Note: If your async data isn't autoloading, make sure you've defined your relationships in both directions.

Embedded

Any relationship that is flagged as embedded: true tells the adapter that the related records have been included in the payload.

Generally, this approach is more complicated and not as widely used, but it has been included to support existing data structures.

hasMany

App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
  comments: DS.hasMany('comment', { embedded: true })
});

Here is what the data structure would look like in Firebase:

{
  "posts": {
    "post_id_1": {
      "comments": {
        "comment_id_1": {
          "body": "This is a comment"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Note: When a model has embedded relationships, the related model should not be saved on its own.

var comment = store.createRecord('comment');
// This WILL NOT save the comment inside of the post because the adapter doesn't know
// where to save the comment without the context of the post
comment.save();

Instead, the comment needs to be added to the post and then the post can be saved

// Add the new comment to the post and save it
post.get('comments').addObject(comment);
// Saving the post will save the embedded comments
post.save()

belongsTo

Any embedded belongsTo relationship must specifiy an id property in the payload

{
  "posts": {
    "post_id_1": {
      "user": {
        "id": "myusername"
      }
    }
  }
}

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to EmberFire, you'll need to run the following commands to get your environment set up:

$ git clone https://github.com/firebase/emberfire.git
$ cd emberfire          # go to the emberfire directory
$ npm install -g grunt  # globally install grunt task runner
$ npm install -g bower  # globally install Bower package manager
$ npm install           # install local npm build / test dependencies
$ bower install         # install local JavaScript dependencies
$ grunt watch           # watch for source file changes

grunt watch will watch for changes in the /src/ directory and lint, concatenate, and minify the source files and run the test suite when a change occurs. The output files - emberfire.js and emberfire.min.js - are written to the /dist/ directory.

You can run the test suite by navigating to file:///path/to/emberfire/test/index.html or via the command line using grunt test.