[META QUEST] Request for Community Help - RecordData!

[runspired]

RecordData!

The EmberData team needs your help!

RecordData RFC #293 brings a much needed codification to the internals of ember-data, giving addon developers needed API access with more confidence and stability while making many commonly requested features (improved dirty-tracking, fragments, alternative Models) possible or easier to be implemented in addon-land.

Beginning in 3.3 canary (which became 3.4), we've been using a build-time flag to allow us to build and run all of ember-data's tests against both the old world and the new world. We are now ready to take the next step, and bring this feature into 3.5 beta for testing against real-world applications.

A Quick Note on 3.4 LTS

Until now, there has never been an official ember-data LTS release. 3.4 is our first LTS candidate, and we will be following the LTS practices and timeline laid out by emberjs. This means that in 6 weeks, 3.4 will advance to LTS. Bugfixes that we are targeting for LTS support are tagged as lts-target.

Stability

Landing a major refactor of the internals of ember-data does not come without risks. Those risks include:

• Unintended changes to public APIs
• Removal or alteration of intimate APIs
• Breaking community addons that depend upon intimate API
• Breaking community addons that depend upon public APIs that change in unexpected ways

We're committed to improving the stability of ember-data, even as we embark on this exciting new journey. In addition to a dedication to steadily expanding and improving our test suite, we recently we landed a number of PRs to help both us and others improve the stability experience when using ember-data

• RenderingTests
• Destroyed Store Assertions
• Async Leak Detection and await settled() support
• External Partner tests
• Improvements to the test suites for past and current releases
• Travis Test Job to catch issues with floating dependencies
• Even more tests!

In addition to the above, LinkedIn has been using the RecordData version of the internals in conjunction with ember-m3 for the past 8 months while we worked to bring it to maturity. While LinkedIn does not use all the features of ember-data, this has given us reasonable confidence that we're ready for additional external partners to test this new feature.

In order to ensure a smooth transition from the pre- to the post- RecordData world, we will be doing the following:

Library Next Steps

• Release 3.5.0-beta.2 with the RecordData feature enabled
• Unskip and fix the belongs-to and has-many rendering tests for RecordData. (Some refactoring of the RecordData version of things may be needed and it may be necessary to write RecordData specific versions of these tests).
• Continue addressing issues surfaced in 3.4 and ensure fixes and tests are applied to both 3.4 and 3.5
• Configure BrowserStack for EmberData and ensure IE11 test coverage
• Address any issues surfaced while RecordData is in beta
• Add "spec tests" for RecordData [TEST] spec-tests for RecordData RFC #5653
• Cleanup anything named modelData in favor of recordData
• Remove the pre-RecordData build path
• Add any additional OS Applications we can to our test suite to ensure wider coverage. (Ghost? UCSF?)

Community Next Steps

• Configure your apps/addons to test against ember-data beta
• Report errors encountered, and help triage/replicate as much as possible
• Help with any of the Library Next Steps that you can
• Help refactor existing addons to utilize RecordData instead of likely-removed intimate APIs (for a good starter list, see our external-partner tests)

When will RecordData enter Stable Release?

The criteria to advance RecordData to a stable release are:

• it is clear that no major issues remain
• that most apps can seamlessly upgrade to it without issue
• the most commonly used community addons support it

[runspired]

#5653 has been opened as an additional item needed for the record-data feature to mature.