Relationships

To declare a one-to-one relationship between two models, use belongsTo:

import Model, { belongsTo } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class UserModel extends Model {
  @belongsTo('profile') profile;
}

import Model, { belongsTo } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class ProfileModel extends Model {
  @belongsTo('user') user;
}

To declare a one-to-many relationship between two models, use belongsTo in combination with hasMany, like this:

import Model, { hasMany } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class BlogPostModel extends Model {
  @hasMany('comment') comments;
}

import Model, { belongsTo } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class CommentModel extends Model {
  @belongsTo('blog-post') blogPost;
}

To declare a many-to-many relationship between two models, use hasMany:

import Model, { hasMany } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class BlogPostModel extends Model {
  @hasMany('tag') tags;
}

import Model, { hasMany } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class TagModel extends Model {
  @hasMany('blog-post') blogPosts;
}

Ember Data will do its best to discover which relationships map to one another. In the one-to-many code above, for example, Ember Data can figure out that changing the comments relationship should update the blogPost relationship on the inverse because blogPost is the only relationship to that model.

However, sometimes you may have multiple belongsTo/hasManys for the same type. You can specify which property on the related model is the inverse using belongsTo or hasMany's inverse option. Relationships without an inverse can be indicated as such by including { inverse: null }.

import Model, { belongsTo } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class CommentModel extends Model {
  @belongsTo('blog-post', { inverse: null }) onePost;
  @belongsTo('blog-post') twoPost;
  @belongsTo('blog-post') redPost;
  @belongsTo('blog-post') bluePost;
}

import Model, { hasMany } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class BlogPostModel extends Model {
  @hasMany('comment', {
    inverse: 'redPost'
  })
  comments;
}

When you want to define a reflexive relation (a model that has a relationship to itself), you must explicitly define the inverse relationship. If there is no inverse relationship then you can set the inverse to null.

Here's an example of a one-to-many reflexive relationship:

import Model, { belongsTo, hasMany } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class FolderModel extends Model {
  @hasMany('folder', { inverse: 'parent' }) children;
  @belongsTo('folder', { inverse: 'children' }) parent;
}

Here's an example of a one-to-one reflexive relationship:

import Model, { attr, belongsTo } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class UserModel extends Model {
  @attr('string') name;
  @belongsTo('user', { inverse: 'bestFriend' }) bestFriend;
}

You can also define a reflexive relationship that doesn't have an inverse:

import Model, { belongsTo } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class FolderModel extends Model {
  @belongsTo('folder', { inverse: null }) parent;
}

Polymorphism is a powerful concept which allows a developer to abstract common functionality into a base class. Consider the following example: a user with multiple payment methods. They could have a linked PayPal account, and a couple credit cards on file.

Note that, for polymorphism to work, Ember Data expects a "type" declaration polymorphic type via the reserved type property on the model. Confused? See the API response below.

First, let's look at the model definitions:

import Model, { hasMany } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class UserModel extends Model {
  @hasMany('payment-method', { polymorphic: true }) paymentMethods;
}

import Model, { belongsTo } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class PaymentMethodModel extends Model {
  @belongsTo('user', { inverse: 'paymentMethods' }) user;
}

import { attr } from '@ember-data/model';
import PaymentMethod from './payment-method';

export default class PaymentMethodCcModel extends PaymentMethod {
  @attr last4;

  get obfuscatedIdentifier() {
    return `**** **** **** ${this.last4}`;
  }
}

import { attr } from '@ember-data/model';
import PaymentMethod from './payment-method'

export default class PaymentMethodPaypalModel extends PaymentMethod {
  @attr linkedEmail;

  get obfuscatedIdentifier() {
    let last5 = this.linkedEmail
      .split('')
      .reverse()
      .slice(0, 5)
      .reverse()
      .join('');

    return `••••${last5}`;
  }
}

And our API might setup these relationships like so:

{
  "data": {
    "id": "8675309",
    "type": "user",
    "attributes": {
      "name": "Anfanie Farmeo"
    },
    "relationships": {
      "payment-methods": {
        "data": [
          {
            "id": "1",
            "type": "payment-method-paypal"
          },
          {
            "id": "2",
            "type": "payment-method-cc"
          },
          {
            "id": "3",
            "type": "payment-method-apple-pay"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  },
  "included": [
    {
      "id": "1",
      "type": "payment-method-paypal",
      "attributes": {
        "linked-email": "[email protected]"
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "2",
      "type": "payment-method-cc",
      "attributes": {
        "last4": "1335"
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "3",
      "type": "payment-method-apple-pay",
      "attributes": {
        "last4": "5513"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Some models may have properties that are deeply nested objects of readonly data. The naïve solution would be to define models for each nested object and use hasMany and belongsTo to recreate the nested relationship. However, since readonly data will never need to be updated and saved this often results in the creation of a great deal of code for very little benefit. An alternate approach is to define these relationships using an attribute with no transform (@attr). This makes it easy to access readonly values in other objects and templates without the overhead of defining extraneous models.

Let's assume that we have a blog-post and a comment model. A single blog post can have several comments linked to it. The correct relationship is shown below:

import Model, { hasMany } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class BlogPostModel extends Model {
  @hasMany('comment') comments;
}

import Model, { belongsTo } from '@ember-data/model';

export default class CommentModel extends Model {
  @belongsTo('blog-post') blogPost;
}

Now, suppose we want to add comments to an existing blogPost. We can do this in two ways, but for both of them, we first need to look up a blog post that is already loaded in the store, using its id:

let myBlogPost = this.store.peekRecord('blog-post', 1);

Now we can either set the belongsTo relationship in our new comment, or, update the blogPost's hasMany relationship. As you might observe, we don't need to set both hasMany and belongsTo for a record. Ember Data will do that for us.

First, let's look at setting the belongsTo relationship in our new comment:

let comment = this.store.createRecord('comment', {
  blogPost: myBlogPost
});
comment.save();

In the above snippet, we have referenced myBlogPost while creating the record. This will let Ember know that the newly created comment belongs to myBlogPost. This will create a new comment record and save it to the server. Ember Data will also update myBlogPost to include our newly created comment in its comments relationship.

The second way of doing the same thing is to link the two records together by updating the blogPost's hasMany relationship as shown below:

let comment = this.store.createRecord('comment', {});
let comments = await myBlogPost.comments;
comments.pushObject(comment);
comment.save().then(function() {
  myBlogPost.save();
});

In this above case, the new comment's belongsTo relationship will be automatically set to the parent blogPost.

Although createRecord is fairly straightforward, the only thing to watch out for is that you cannot assign a promise as a relationship, currently.

For example, if you want to set the author property of a blogPost, this would not work if the user with id isn't already loaded into the store:

this.store.createRecord('blog-post', {
  title: 'Rails is Omakase',
  body: 'Lorem ipsum',
  author: this.store.findRecord('user', 1)
});

However, you can easily set the relationship after the promise has fulfilled:

let blogPost = this.store.createRecord('blog-post', {
  title: 'Rails is Omakase',
  body: 'Lorem ipsum'
});

this.store.findRecord('user', 1).then(function(user) {
  blogPost.author = user;
});

When you request data from the server for a model that has relationships with one or more others, you may want to retrieve records corresponding to those related models at the same time. For example, when retrieving a blog post, you may need to access the comments associated with the post as well. The JSON:API specification allows servers to accept a query parameter with the key include as a request to include those related records in the response returned to the client. The value of the parameter should be a comma-separated list of names of the relationships required.

If you are using an adapter that supports JSON:API, such as Ember's default JSONAPIAdapter, you can easily add the include parameter to the server requests created by the findRecord(), findAll(), query() and queryRecord() methods.

findRecord() and findAll() each take an options argument in which you can specify the include parameter. For example, given a post model that has a hasMany relationship with a comment model, when retrieving a specific post we can have the server also return that post's comments as follows:

import Route from '@ember/routing/route';
import { inject as service } from '@ember/service';

export default class PostRoute extends Route {
  @service store;
  model(params) {
    return this.store.findRecord('post', params.post_id, {
      include: 'comments'
    });
  }
}

The post's comments would then be available in your template as model.comments.

Nested relationships can be specified in the include parameter as a dot-separated sequence of relationship names. So to request both the post's comments and the authors of those comments the request would look like this:

import Route from '@ember/routing/route';
import { inject as service } from '@ember/service';

export default class PostRoute extends Route {
  @service store;
  model(params) {
    return this.store.findRecord('post', params.post_id, {
      include: 'comments,comments.author'
    });
  }
}

The query() and queryRecord() methods each take a query argument that is serialized directly into the URL query string and the include parameter may form part of that argument. For example:

import Route from '@ember/routing/route';
import { inject as service } from '@ember/service';

export default class AdeleRoute extends Route {
  @service store;
  model() {
    // GET to /artists?filter[name]=Adele&include=albums
    return this.store
      .query('artist', {
        filter: { name: 'Adele' },
        include: 'albums'
      })
      .then(function(artists) {
        return artists.firstObject;
      });
  }
}

Sometimes we want to set relationships on already existing records. We can simply set a belongsTo relationship:

let blogPost = this.store.peekRecord('blog-post', 1);
let comment = this.store.peekRecord('comment', 1);
comment.blogPost = blogPost;
comment.save();

Alternatively, we could update the hasMany relationship by pushing a record into the relationship:

let blogPost = this.store.peekRecord('blog-post', 1);
let comment = this.store.peekRecord('comment', 1);
let comments = await blogPost.comments;
comments.pushObject(comment);
blogPost.save();

To remove a belongsTo relationship, we can set it to null, which will also remove it from the hasMany side:

let comment = this.store.peekRecord('comment', 1);
comment.blogPost = null;
comment.save();

It is also possible to remove a record from a hasMany relationship:

let blogPost = this.store.peekRecord('blog-post', 1);
let comment = this.store.peekRecord('comment', 1);
let comments = await blogPost.comments;
comments.removeObject(comment);
blogPost.save();

As in the earlier examples, the comment's belongsTo relationship will also be cleared by Ember Data.

While working with relationships it is important to remember that they return promises.

For example, if we were to work on a blogPost's asynchronous comments, we would have to wait until the promise has fulfilled:

let blogPost = this.store.peekRecord('blog-post', 1);

let comments = await blogPost.comments;
// now we can work with the comments

The same applies to belongsTo relationships:

let comment = this.store.peekRecord('comment', 1);

let blogPost = await comment.blogPost;
// the blogPost is available here

Handlebars templates will automatically be updated to reflect a resolved promise. We can display a list of comments in a blogPost like so:

<ul>
  {{#each this.blogPost.comments as |comment|}}
    <li>{{comment.id}}</li>
  {{/each}}
</ul>

Ember Data will query the server for the appropriate records and re-render the template once the data is received.