This is a four-part series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Let’s implement some navigation in the Boston Ember app.

Here is a list of sections in the Boston Ember website I’d like to add:

About

Speakers

For this part we will work with faked out data. In a future part we will provide the Rails backend.

Our first navigation test will be an easy one, create ember/tests/integration/about-page-test.js

import Ember from 'ember'; import startApp from 'bostonember/tests/helpers/start-app'; var App; module('Integration - About Page', { beforeEach: function() { App = startApp(); }, afterEach: function() { Ember.run(App, 'destroy'); } }); test('Should navigate to the About page', function() { visit('/').then(function(assert) { click("a:contains('About')").then(function(assert) { assert.equal(find('h3').text(), 'About'); }); }); });

After writing this test we can confirm that our test is red in our browser. To make this green we need to add an About route, a link from the landing page to the About route, and a template for the About route.

// ember/app/router.js Router.map(function() { this.route('about'); });

// ember/app/templates/application.hbs <h2 id="title">Welcome to Boston Ember</h2> {{link-to 'About' 'about'}} {{outlet}}

// ember/app/templates/about.hbs <h3>About</h3> <p>Boston Ember is the monthly meetup where awesome people get together to do awesome Ember related things!</p>

Your test should now be green. If you navigate to the root path in your browser you should be able to click through the app. What about getting back to root? We can add a test to for this navigation as well.

// ember/tests/integration/landing-page-test.js test('Should allow navigating back to root from another page', function(assert) { visit('/about').then(function() { click('a:contains("Home")').then(function(assert) { assert.notEqual(find('h3').text(), 'About'); }); }); });

// ember/app/templates/application.hbs {{link-to 'Home' 'application'}} {{link-to 'About' 'about'}}

Great! A very simple navigation is setup and fully tested. How about something more complex. Let’s allow our visitors to see the people that have spoken at Boston Ember. Before we do that we need to add new dependencies to our app for mocking out remote requests.

We will be using Pretender by Ember Core member Trek Glowacki. Pretender is a nice DSL for faking out remote responses.

We can use the ember-cli-pretender Ember CLI Addon to quickly set up Pretender:

npm install --save-dev ember-cli-pretender ember install:addon ember-cli-pretender

You may need to restart your server at this point.

Tell JSHint to ignore the Pretender constant. Open up ember/tests/.jshintrc and add "Pretender" to the end of the "predef" array.

Finally we need ember-data to make requests namespaced under api to our server:

// ember/app/adapters/application.js import DS from 'ember-data'; export default DS.ActiveModelAdapter.extend({ namespace: 'api' });

We should be in a good place to write our tests.

// ember/tests/integration/speakers-page-test.js import Ember from 'ember'; import startApp from '../helpers/start-app'; import Pretender from 'pretender'; var App, server; module('Integration - Speaker Page', { beforeEach: function() { App = startApp(); var speakers = [ { id: 1, name: 'Bugs Bunny' }, { id: 2, name: 'Wile E. Coyote' }, { id: 3, name: 'Yosemite Sam' } ]; server = new Pretender(function() { this.get('/api/speakers', function(request) { return [200, {"Content-Type": "application/json"}, JSON.stringify({speakers: speakers})]; }); this.get('/api/speakers/:id', function(request) { var speaker = speakers.find(function(speaker) { if (speaker.id === parseInt(request.params.id, 10)) { return speaker; } }); return [200, {"Content-Type": "application/json"}, JSON.stringify({speaker: speaker})]; }); }); }, afterEach: function() { Ember.run(App, 'destroy'); server.shutdown(); } }); test('Should allow navigation to the speakers page from the landing page', function(assert) { visit('/').then(function() { click('a:contains("Speakers")').then(function(assert) { assert.equal(find('h3').text(), 'Speakers'); }); }); }); test('Should list all speakers', function(assert) { visit('/speakers').then(function() { assert.equal(find('a:contains("Bugs Bunny")').length, 1); assert.equal(find('a:contains("Wile E. Coyote")').length, 1); assert.equal(find('a:contains("Yosemite Sam")').length, 1); }); }); test('Should be able to navigate to a speaker page', function(assert) { visit('/speakers').then(function() { click('a:contains("Bugs Bunny")').then(function() { assert.equal(find('h4').text(), 'Bugs Bunny'); }); }); }); test('Should be able visit a speaker page', function(assert) { visit('/speakers/1').then(function() { assert.equal(find('h4').text(), 'Bugs Bunny'); }); });

Take a look at the beforeEach function. There is an array of objects that contains the speaker data, currently only id s and name s. Below that we are setting up the request stubs. Currently this feels like a lot of boilerplate, and that is because it is. I’m sure eventually someone will write a nice abstraction to clean this up. This code simply stubs out the expected server-side calls and returns a JSON string in the format ember-data expects.

Our four tests are very simple. The first tests the navigation, the 2nd tests the speakers are in the list, the 3rd tests that we can navigate to an individual speaker, and the 4th tests that we can visit the speaker page directly.

Let’s make each pass:

// ember/app/router.js Router.map(function() { this.route('about'); this.resource('speakers'); });

// ember/app/templates/application.hbs {{link-to 'About' 'about'}} {{link-to 'Speakers' 'speakers'}}

// ember/app/templates/speakers.hbs <h3>Speakers</h3> {{outlet}}

The first test should now be passing.

// ember/app/router.js Router.map(function() { this.route('about'); this.resource('speakers', function() { this.route('show', {path: ':speaker_id'}); }); });

// ember/app/models/speaker.js import DS from 'ember-data'; export default DS.Model.extend({ name: DS.attr('string') });

// ember/app/routes/speakers/index.js import Ember from 'ember'; export default Ember.Route.extend({ model: function() { return this.store.find('speaker'); } });

// ember/app/templates/speakers/index.hbs {{#each}} {{link-to name 'speakers.show' this}} {{/each}}

The 2nd test should now be passing.

// ember/app/templates/speakers/show.hbs <h4>{{name}}</h4>

The 3rd & 4th tests should now be passing.

Passing tests are great and all, but let’s actually make the app useable by getting our Rails backend in the game.

Let’s generate a model from our Rails app rails g model speaker name:string

Add some seed data:

# rails/db/seeds.rb Speaker.create(name: 'Bugs Bunny') Speaker.create(name: 'Wile E. Coyote') Speaker.create(name: 'Yosemite Sam')

Create, migrate and seed rake db:create db:migrate db:seed .

Add a speakers resource under an api namespace:

# rails/config/routes.rb namespace :api do resources :speakers end

Now add the controller:

# rails/app/controllers/api/speakers_controller.rb class Api::SpeakersController < ApplicationController def index render json: Speaker.all end def show render json: Speaker.find(params[:id]) end end

Finally we need to generate a serializer rails g serializer speaker .

Add name to the list of attributes to serialize

class SpeakerSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer attributes :id, :name end

Start your Rails server with port 3000 and restart your ember server with the command ember server --proxy http://localhost:3000

Any remote requests will be proxied to this location.

Now you can point your browser to http://localhost:4200 , click on Speakers and you should see:

That wraps up Part 3. In Part 4 we will get into relationships.

Check out the actual code for this part