API integration

This article will illustrate how the users are displayed and updated on the /admin/users route, their roles, user links etc. using the users API in Open Event Frontend. The primary end point of Open Event API with which we are concerned with for fetching the users is

GET /v1/users

First, we need to create a model for the user, which will have the fields corresponding to the API, so we proceed with the ember CLI command:

ember g model user

Next, we need to define the model according to the requirements. The model needs to extend the base model class. As a user can have multiple notifications, orders and  sessions etc. so we have to use ember data relationships “hasMany”. Hence, the model will have the following format.

import ModelBase from 'open-event-frontend/models/base';
import { hasMany } from 'ember-data/relationships';

export default ModelBase.extend({
  email        : attr('string'),
  password     : attr('string'),
  isVerified   : attr('boolean', { readOnly: true }),
  isSuperAdmin : attr('boolean', { readOnly: true }),
  isAdmin      : attr('boolean', { readOnly: true }),
  firstName : attr('string'),
  lastName  : attr('string')
});

The complete code for the model can be seen here

Now, we need to load the data from the API using the above model, so we will send a GET request to the API to fetch the users. This can be easily achieved using this.

return this.get('store').query('user', {'page[size]': 10 });

The above line is querying for the users from the store which is place where cache of all of the records that have been loaded by our application is there. If a route asks for a record, the store can return it immediately if it is there in the cache and we want to display only 10 users in a page so defined how many number of users has to be loaded at a time.

Now we need to filter the users based on whether they are active or they have deleted their accounts. For this purpose, we need to pass filter to the query which will tell what type of users to be loaded at once.

The next thing we need to do is to display the above data fetched from the API into an ember table. Ember table helps in allowing us to render very large data sets by only rendering the rows that are being displayed. For this, we defined a controller class which will help in letting the table know what all columns will be required to display and the attribute values they correspond in the API. We can also define the template for each column. The code for the controller class looks like this.

import Ember from 'ember';

const { Controller } = Ember;
export default Controller.extend({
  columns: [
    {
      propertyName     : 'first-name',
      title            : 'Name',
      disableSorting   : true,
      disableFiltering : true
    },
    {
      propertyName     : 'email',
      title            : 'Email',
      disableSorting   : true,
      disableFiltering : true
     },
     {
      propertyName     : 'last-accessed-at',
      title            : 'Last Accessed',
      template         : 'components/ui-table/cell/admin/users/cell-last-accessed-at',
      disableSorting   : true,
      disableFiltering : true
    }
   ]
});

In the above code, we can see a field called ‘disableSorting’ which is true if we don’t want to sort the table based on that column. Since we want the last-accessed-at column to be customized, so we have separately added a template for the column which will ensure how it will look in the column. The complete code for the other columns which are there in table apart from these can be found here.

Now to display the ember table we will write the following code.

{{events/events-table columns=columns data=model
    useNumericPagination=true
    showGlobalFilter=true
    showPageSize=true
}}

In the above piece of code, we are calling the same ember table as we used in case of events to reduce the code duplication. We are passing the columns and data in the table which remains unique to the table. Next, we are ensuring that our page shows the amount of data we’re fetching at one go, allows the filtering the table based on the columns.

The UI of the users page for the above code snippets look like this.

Fig 1: The UI of the users table under admin/users route

The entire code for implementing the users API can be seen here.

To conclude, this is how we efficiently fetched the users using the Open-Event-Orga users API, ensuring that there is no unnecessary API call to fetch the data and no code duplication using the same ember table again.

Resources:

• Open Event API Docs
• Official Ember Data documentation
• An article on how to create GET requests in ember in the blog by Adam Sommer