JSONAPI store.normalize doesn't accept "data:{}" format

[orestis]

I thought there was a bug in normalize, but @wecc pointed to me that store.normalize expects its payload to not be wrapped in a data:{...} block. Passing it a JSONAPI server's response directly results in a weird exception when trying to deCamelize.

I believe there should either be a warning when the data seems not-correctly structured, or since the usefulness of being able to pass an unmodified server response directly to normalize (and then to store.push), it should be able to handle both cases.

I am aware of the pushPayload (and the relevant feature flag in 2.5 to return values from it) but it would be nice if this worked too.

Original (now working) Twiddle here: https://ember-twiddle.com/f57e4bff221997a87f51?openFiles=templates.application.hbs%2C

[pangratz]

I am aware of the pushPayload (and the relevant feature flag in 2.5 to return values from it) but it would be nice if this worked too.

There was a PR which introduced store.normalizePayload #3838, but it has been closed since we thought that the ds-pushpayload-return feature would be sufficient.

Can you outline the use case for which you would need a method, which normalizes the payload but does not push it into the store?

[orestis]

That is a fair question - I don't have an answer. This mainly stem because my back-end always wraps things with data. The documentation states:

push is used to notify Ember Data's store of new or updated records that exist in the backend. This will return a record in the loaded.saved state. The primary use-case for store#push is to notify Ember Data about record updates (full or partial) that happen outside of the normal adapter methods (for example SSE or Web Sockets).

normalize converts a json payload into the normalized form that push expects.

And adds the example that I missed all along (that you have to extract .data). This is more a documentation issue now, because I'm not sure where I could get some payload that a) needs normalization through the adapter and b) doesn't come from my back-end (which does return things in a JSONAPI format). Other people might have more niche use-cases though.

[bmac]

@wecc what are your thoughts on the idea of making normalize smart enough to unwrap the object from if its nested under a data key?

[pangratz]

FYI, RFC#161 proposes to have a public store.normalizePayload()...

[runspired]

Given the ease of composing a few store methods to properly normalize data with better context than store.normalize is capable of, I'm going to close this.

As an example:

const modelName = 'user';
const ModelClass = store.modelFor(modelName);
const serializer = store.serializerFor(modelName);
const normalized = serializer.normalizeResponse(store, ModelClass, rawPayload, null, 'query');