Computed alias incompatible with relationships

[Asherlc]

It appears that Ember.computed.alias doesn’t work for populating relationships:

http://emberjs.jsbin.com/kopive/4/edit?html,css,js,output (with alias, non-working), vs this: http://emberjs.jsbin.com/kopive/2/edit?html,css,js,output (sans alias, working)

[wecc]

If your relationship is named volume instead of book you have to update your payload to reflect the name of the relationship:

relationships: {
  volume: {
    data: { type: 'books', id: '1' }
  }
}

[Asherlc]

Right, but wouldn't the expected behavior of alias be that it would allow for the relationship name change?

[wecc]

Ah, I see what you mean. No, that's not possible :( Relationships are special CPs that ED has to know about beforehand so the alias wouldn't be discovered by ED as a relationship.

[pangratz]

If you want to use a different name for a relationship in your payload, you can specify this within your serializer via the attrs hash:

App.AuthorSerializer = DS.JSONAPISerializer.extend({
  attrs: {
    book: { key: 'volume' }
  }
});

Note that there was a bug in JSONAPISerializer when using attrs with relationships. This has been fixed in #3847, available in v2.2.0-beta.2.

---

If you are using a version of ember-data < v2.2.0-beta.2, you can use keyForRelationship:

App.AuthorSerializer = DS.JSONAPISerializer.extend({
  keyForRelationship: function(key) {
    if ("book" === key) {
      return "volume";
    }

    return this._super(...arguments);
  }
});

[Asherlc]

Ah, that's unfortunate :(. I was hoping it would behave like Rails' alias_attr, which allows exactly that, and is quite useful for me.

[bmac]

Closing this issue as its working as intended. Ember.computed.alias sets up an alias when working in app code while the serializer is use to configure the payload sent and received by the server.