In Open Event Frontend, at the index page of the application, we have a notification dropdown in which a user gets the notifications regarding the events, sessions, etc. Thus, a user gets notified for the particular event or session he wants to receive notifications about. While dealing with an issue, we had to integrate the API with the frontend. We achieved it as follows:

First, we create a model of notifications so that we have basic structure ready. It goes as follows:

export default ModelBase.extend({
  title      : attr('string'),
  message    : attr('string'),
  isRead     : attr('boolean', { defaultValue: false }),
  receivedAt : attr('moment'),

  user: belongsTo('user')
});

Thus, we have fields like title, message, isRead, receivedAt which we will get from the server response as JSON which we will need to show on the page. To show the notifications to the user, first we need to query the notifications for a specific user using ember data. Since we are querying the notifications for a specific user when he is logged in, we are also having relationship between user and notification as shown in the above notification model. In user model we do:

notifications: hasMany('notification')

Now, we query the notifications in our application route i.e routes/application.js

model() {
    if (this.get('session.isAuthenticated')) {
      return new RSVP.Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        this.store.findRecord('user', this.get('authManager.currentUser.id'), { reload: true })
          .then(user => {
            user.get('notifications').then(resolve).catch(reject);
          })
          .catch(reject);
      });
    }
  }

The reason why we used a RSVP promise here was because the authManager couldn’t load the user befor the notifications were queried and returned. Thus, we query the notifications by using currentUser from authManager. Thus, in our template, we iterate over our notifications as follows:

    {{#each notifications as  notification }}
      <div class="item">
        <div class="header">
          {{notification.title}}
        </div>
        <div class="content weight-600">
          {{notification.description}}
        </div>
        <div class="left floated content">
          {{moment-from-now notification.createdAt}}
        </div>
      </div>
    {{/each}}

The notifications are thus shown to the user when he clicks the icon in the nav-bar. As a result, we get the following notifications in the dropdown:

Resources:

Ember data official guide

Blog on Ember data by Embedly.