Start Date Release Date Release Versions PR link Tracking Link Stage Teams
4/18/2018
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  • Data

Ember Data Filter Deprecation

Summary

Deprecate the store.filter API. This API was previously gated behind a private ENV variable that was enabled by the addon ember-data-filter.

Motivation

The filter API was a "memory leak by design". Patterns exist with no-worse ergonomics that have better performance and do not incur memory leak penalties.

While the change in ergonomics for end consumers in minimal, the change to ember-data is substantial. The code for this feature required significant amounts of confusing internal plumbing to ensure that filters were rerun every time any form of mutation (update, addition, deletion) occurred to any record.

In addition to maintenance costs, this plumbing negatively affects the performance of all RecordArrays, and slow any operations that count as mutations (such as pushing new records into the store).

By removing this feature, we significantly simplify and streamline the core of Ember Data.

Detailed design

We will provide 3 new deprecations with links to a guide on how to refactor. These deprecations will target 3.5, meaning that the ember-data-filter addon will continue to work and be supported through the release of ember-data 3.4.

Deprecation: ember-data-filter:filter

Deprecate the primary case (store.filter('posts', filterFn)). Instead, users can combine store.peekAll with a computed property.

Deprecation: ember-data-filter:query-for-filter

This deprecation is specific to folks providing a query to be requested the first time a filter is run. To do this better, users can separate their usage of filter from their usage of query.

Deprecation: ember-data-filter:empty-filter

In the case that users were creating a filter with no method for filtering by, a deprecation is printed letting them know that the easiest path forward is to use peekAll, which would return the same record result set.

How we teach this

The filter API is rarely used, having been discouraged for many years. A simple post alerting users to it's deprecation should be sufficient. The refactoring guide is sufficiently simple that teaching folks a better way should not be much of a hurdle.

Drawbacks

Minor churn for folks that did use this API; however, the end result will improve the performance of apps using filters more so than anyone else.

Alternatives

There's been some talk of an API for local querying; however, said alternative RFC would only result in deprecating this API as well.

Unresolved questions

None