# Significant patterns

The Consul UI tries to follow typical conventional ember but differs
significantly in several places:

## Routing

We use a declarative configuration format for our routing rather than Ember's
DSL. The format is closely modeled on Ember's DSL and if you need to generate
Ember's DSL from this for some reason you can use one of our Debug Utilities
to do this.

## Routes

We use a specific BaseRoute as a parent Route for **all** our Routes. This contains project wide
functionality for several important additions. If you use the normal `ember
generate route route-name` generator this inheritance is automatically added
for you. If you don't use the generator please ensure you use:

```js
import Route from 'consul-ui/routing/route';
export default class NameOfRoute extends Route {}
```

Query parameters should be added to Routes, not Controllers. If a controller
has no query parameters configured they are copied over from the Route.
Preferably we don't use Controllers, but this doesn't mean you shouldn't if
you need to.

## Routlets

We use have a concept of 'routlets', the combination of a `<Route />` and
`<Outlet />` components that we use within our route templates to achieve
several different pieces of functionality.

Every route template should be wrapped in a `<Route @name={{routeName}}>` component and ever
`{{outlet}}` should be wrapped in `<Outlet @name={{routeName}}>` component.
The `routeName` variable is made available in every single route template and
it equal to the routeName of the current template e.g. `dc.services.index`

## DataSources

In order to support our live updating long-polling blocking queries we use
'DataSources' which come in two flavours. A service backed
approach for use within javascript:

```js
class RouteName extends Route {
  @service('datasource/service') data;
  async model(params) {
    return this.data.source(uri => uri`/${params.nspace}/${params.dc}/services`)
  }
}
```

This method returns an Ember proxy that lets you access the data as if it was
'just the data', but is also reactive/auto updates when the data in the
backend updates, for example:

```hbs

{{@model.Name}}

```

And a component based approach for use within templates.

```hbs
<DataSource @src={{
  uri '/${nspace}/${dc}/services'
  (hash
    nspace="default"
    dc="dc"
  )
  }}
  @onchange=""
/>
```

See the relavant component/service documentation for more detail.

## Components

You could group our components into two different groups:

1. UI Components - generic components not necessarily specific to the product.
2. Consul Components - Components that are specific to Consul/the product.
These are mostly 'glorified partials'.

Mostly the CSS for a component lives in the component folder itself, but if it
makes sense for it not to live here, thats fine.

We currently use a mix of named/block slots and contextual components and its
fair to say that we use more named/block slots, but both are fine depending on
your use case.

## Significant Addons

- `ember-data` - model layer
- `ember-stargate` - wormhole/portal/put this DOM over there functionality
- `ember-can` - user abilities and permissions
- `ember-composable-helpers`, `ember-string-fns`, `ember-truth-helpers` - helpers x lots
- `ember-changeset` and `ember-changeset-validations` - form validation
- `ember-cli-flash` - notifications

Please see our package.json file dependencies.


