Here’s the structure of a component that I’m presenting in a News feed plugin on a page that’s not tied to the forum part of Discourse. My question is: Am I doing it right?
A controller that creates the components model and stores it as a variable on itself.
A model that fetches its own data with ajax on creation and start a subscription on the messagebus that is passed on from the constructor.
A component that receives its model from the creation in markup. It cancels the subscription on willDestroyElement and reinitiates it on didInsertElement.
A template representing the markup.
I’m not sure if this is the right way to go. Is it right to pass the model this way? Should a component have a model? Should the model fetch it’s own data? It is not as self contained as I would have thought a component should be. Should it even be implemented as a component?
One thing I’ve never been 100% clear in Ember is how they want you to fetch data for widgets that aren’t related to the rest of the content. I think fetching the data the way you suggest is probably fine. I think maybe using an Ember Service that is injected into your component to fetch the model is probably the accepted way to do it.
I am far from being even vaguely knowledgable about Ember, but I did have a similar problem to you - a component that needed persistent data unrelated to the page content.
I then used that for my plugin here - the source code might be useful for you: