使用rails或ember从外部api缓存数据？

Question

I have an ember/rails application with three main templates, Home, Contacts, and Payments. Both the contacts and payments templates need an array of contacts. This array needs to be populated from an external api. Currently, for the contacts every time I am going to this template the external api is being hit. Ideally I would like to hit the api asynchronously when a user first signs in, grabs this data once and can refer back to it without hitting the external api until necessary.

With rails I could easily just add has_one :contacts_list for user with a postgres json column and when switching the templates conditionally refresh this whenever needed. I am curious as to the best way to deal with this problem in ember.

Answer 1

I've used the setupController method on a route to do this type of caching. Just check to see if the content is already available, and only load it if it's not there. Something like this:

App.ContactsRoute = Ember.Route.extend({
  setupController : function(controller,model){
    if(!controller.get('content')){
      this.store.find('contact').then(function(contacts){
        controller.set('content',contacts)
      });
    }
  }
});

Answer 2

You should create a DS.Model for 'contact' and use a has_many on Contacts and Payments model. Then, you could specify 'async: true' like

DS.hasMany('contact', {async: true}),

This will load the contacts asynchronously if they have not been loaded already. If they have been loaded, it will simply return the loaded contacts.

I am assuming that you have the following models: Contacts, Payments.