ember-ajax

Service for making AJAX requests in Ember applications.

• customizable service
• returns RSVP promises
• improved error handling
• ability to specify request headers

Getting started

If you're just starting out, you already have ember-ajax installed! However, if it's missing from your package.json, you can add it by doing:

ember install ember-ajax

To use the ajax service, inject the ajax service into your route or component.

import Ember from 'ember';

export default Ember.Route.extend({
  ajax: Ember.inject.service(),
  model() {
    return this.get('ajax').request('/posts');
  }
});

Ajax Service

Basic Usage

The AJAX service provides methods to be used to make AJAX requests, similar to the way that you would use jQuery.ajax. In fact, ember-ajax is a wrapper around jQuery's method, and can be configured in much the same way.

In general, you will use the request(url, options) method, where url is the destination of the request and options is a configuration hash for jQuery.ajax.

import Ember from 'ember';

export default Ember.Controller.extend({
  ajax: Ember.inject.service(),
  actions: {
    sendRequest() {
      return this.get('ajax').request('/posts', {
        method: 'POST',
        data: {
          foo: 'bar'
        }
      });
    }
  }
});

In this example, this.get('ajax').request() will return a promise with the result of the request. Your handler code inside .then or .catch will automatically be wrapped in an Ember run loop for maximum compatibility with Ember, right out of the box.

HTTP-verbed methods

You can skip setting the method or type keys in your options object when calling request(url, options) by instead calling post(url, options), put(url, options), patch(url, options) or del(url, options).

post('/posts', { data: { title: 'Ember' } }); // Makes a POST request to /posts
put('/posts/1', { data: { title: 'Ember' } }); // Makes a PUT request to /posts/1
patch('/posts/1', { data: { title: 'Ember' } }); // Makes a PATCH request to /posts/1
del('/posts/1'); // Makes a DELETE request to /posts/1

Custom Request Headers

ember-ajax allows you to specify headers to be used with a request. This is especially helpful when you have a session service that provides an auth token that you have to include with the requests to authorize your requests.

To include custom headers to be used with your requests, you can specify headers hash on the Ajax Service.

// app/services/ajax.js

import Ember from 'ember';
import AjaxService from 'ember-ajax/services/ajax';

export default AjaxService.extend({
  session: Ember.inject.service(),
  headers: Ember.computed('session.authToken', {
    get() {
      let headers = {};
      const authToken = this.get('session.authToken');
      if (authToken) {
        headers['auth-token'] = authToken;
      }
      return headers;
    }
  })
});

Headers by default are only passed if the hosts match, or the request is a relative path. You can overwrite this behavior by either passing a host in with the request, setting the host for the ajax service, or by setting an array of trustedHosts that can be either an array of strings or regexes.

// app/services/ajax.js

import Ember from 'ember';
import AjaxService from 'ember-ajax/services/ajax';

export default AjaxService.extend({
  trustedHosts: [/\.example\./, 'foo.bar.com']
});

Custom Endpoint Path

The namespace property can be used to prefix requests with a specific url namespace.

// app/services/ajax.js
import Ember from 'ember';
import AjaxService from 'ember-ajax/services/ajax';

export default AjaxService.extend({
  namespace: '/api/v1'
});

request('/users/me') would now target /api/v1/users/me

If you need to override the namespace for a custom request, use the namespace as an option to the request methods.

// GET /api/legacy/users/me
request('/users/me', { namespace: '/api/legacy' });

Custom Host

ember-ajax allows you to specify a host to be used with a request. This is especially helpful so you don't have to continually pass in the host along with the path, makes request() a bit cleaner.

To include a custom host to be used with your requests, you can specify host property on the Ajax Service.

// app/services/ajax.js

import Ember from 'ember';
import AjaxService from 'ember-ajax/services/ajax';

export default AjaxService.extend({
  host: 'http://api.example.com'
});

That allows you to only have to make a call to request() as such:

// GET http://api.example.com/users/me
request('/users/me');

Custom Content-Type

ember-ajax allows you to specify a default Content-Type header to be used with a request.

To include a custom Content-Type you can specify contentType property on the Ajax Service.

// app/services/ajax.js

import Ember from 'ember';
import AjaxService from 'ember-ajax/services/ajax';

export default AjaxService.extend({
  contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8'
});

You can also override the Content-Type per request with the options parameter.

Customize isSuccess

Some APIs respond with status code 200, even though an error has occurred and provide a status code in the payload. With the service, you can easily account for this behaviour by overwriting the isSuccess method.

// app/services/ajax.js

import AjaxService from 'ember-ajax/services/ajax';

export default AjaxService.extend({
  isSuccess(status, headers, payload) {
    let isSuccess = this._super(...arguments);
    if (isSuccess && payload.status) {
      // when status === 200 and payload has status property,
      // check that payload.status is also considered a success request
      return this._super(payload.status);
    }
    return isSuccess;
  }
});

Error handling

ember-ajax provides built in error classes that you can use to check the error that was returned by the response. This allows you to restrict determination of error result to the service instead of sprinkling it around your code.

Built in error types

ember-ajax has built-in error types that will be returned from the service in the event of an error:

• BadRequestError (400)
• UnauthorizedError(401)
• ForbiddenError(403)
• NotFoundError (404)
• InvalidError(422)
• ServerError (5XX)
• AbortError
• TimeoutError

All of the above errors are subtypes of AjaxError.

Error detection helpers

ember-ajax comes with helper functions for matching response errors to their respective ember-ajax error type. Each of the errors listed above has a corresponding is* function (e.g., isBadRequestError).

Use of these functions is strongly encouraged to help eliminate the need for boilerplate error detection code.

import Ember from 'ember';
import {
  isAjaxError,
  isNotFoundError,
  isForbiddenError
} from 'ember-ajax/errors';

export default Ember.Route.extend({
  ajax: Ember.inject.service(),
  model() {
    const ajax = this.get('ajax');

    return ajax.request('/user/doesnotexist').catch(function(error) {
      if (isNotFoundError(error)) {
        // handle 404 errors here
        return;
      }

      if (isForbiddenError(error)) {
        // handle 403 errors here
        return;
      }

      if (isAjaxError(error)) {
        // handle all other AjaxErrors here
        return;
      }

      // other errors are handled elsewhere
      throw error;
    });
  }
});

If your errors aren't standard, the helper function for that error type can be used as the base to build your custom detection function.

Access the response in case of error

If you need to access the json response of a request that failed, you can use the raw method instead of request.

this.get('ajax')
  .raw(url, options)
  .then(({ response }) => this.handleSuccess(response))
  .catch(({ response, jqXHR, payload }) => this.handleError(response));

Note that in this use case there's no access to the error object. You can inspect the jqXHR object for additional information about the failed request. In particular jqXHR.status returns the relevant HTTP error code.

Usage with Ember Data

Ember AJAX provides a mixin that can be used in an Ember Data Adapter to avoid the networking code provided by Ember Data and rely on Ember AJAX instead. This serves as a first step toward true integration of Ember AJAX into Ember Data.

To use the mixin, you can include the mixin into an Adapter, like so:

// app/adapters/application.js
import DS from 'ember-data';
import AjaxServiceSupport from 'ember-ajax/mixins/ajax-support';

export default DS.JSONAPIAdapter.extend(AjaxServiceSupport);

That's all the configuration required! If you want to customize the adapter, such as using an alternative AJAX service (like one you extended yourself), hooks to do so are provided; check out the mixin's implementation for details.

Note that instead of using the Ember Data error checking code in your application, you should use the ones provided by Ember AJAX.

Stand-Alone Usage

If you aren't using Ember Data and do not have access to services, you can import the ajax utility like so:

import request from 'ember-ajax/request';

export default function someUtility(url) {
  var options = {
    // request options
  };

  return request(url, options).then(response => {
    // `response` is the data from the server
    return response;
  });
}

Which will have the same API as the ajax service. If you want the raw jQuery XHR object then you can use the raw method instead:

import raw from 'ember-ajax/raw';

export default function someOtherUtility(url) {
  var options = {
    // raw options
  };

  return raw(url, options).then(result => {
    // `result` is an object containing `response` and `jqXHR`, among other items
    return result;
  });
}

Local Development

This information is only relevant if you're looking to contribute to ember-ajax.

Compatibility

• Node.js 6 or above
• Ember CLI v2.13 or above

Installation

• git clone this repository
• npm install

Running

• ember server
• Visit your app at http://localhost:4200.

Running Tests

• ember test
• ember test --server

Building

• ember build

For more information on using ember-cli, visit http://www.ember-cli.com/.