# Significant patterns

## Ember specific

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.

## Consul specific

### Namespace support

Whilst Consul namespaces are a OSS feature of Consul, we almost always build
things 'pretending' that namespaces are always enabled. Then there is code
within the data layer of the application that removes any namespace related
query parameters.

Namespaces are a little more complex to think about than other things in
Consul as we have the idea of 'the default' namespace, and then additionally
an ACL token can have 'a default' namespace (not the same as 'the default'
namespace) which is a little like a namespace that is assigned to the token,
or where the token originated from. The Consul backend can then use the tokens
default/origin/assigned namespace to figure out whether and how to filter any
results by namespace before sending those results to the UI.

When you are requesting data from the API you should always include a
namespace (if applicable to the API endpoint), but you should never default
the namespace value to 'the default' namespace - `default`. Conversly, when
receiving data from an API response, there are some places where we do default
a namespace to 'the default' namespace `default`. The easiest way to think
about this is: If its on the way out, don't add a default ever, if its on the
way in you may need to default any potentially empty Namespace parameters to
`default` (due to using Consul without namespaces enabled), there is a
NspaceAbility and/or an `env` feature flag to help you to discover this.

We've made various decisions in the UI to make it hard to omit a namespace
when you shouldn't, for example using our DataSource component requires you to
include a defined namespace parameter (even if the value for that is `''`),
and the route parameter `nspace` value will always default to `''`. It also
reminds you to be continually thinking about namespaces whilst adding new
features.

Lastly, we always refer to namespaces in code as the word `nspace` or
`nspaces`. Both `ns` and `namespace` have other purposes in Ember and Ember
Data (in various places one is significant but not the other and vice versa).
Always using the term `nspace` means we avoid any strange bugs or
clashes/overwrites with anything in Ember or Ember Data core. The only place
where we use `ns` or `Namespace` is to construct API requests/responses.
Sometimes when using this term in CSS or on plain javascript objects, this may
seem unnecessary but it just helps smooth over writing code around namespaces
as you don't have the split second decision of whether you write `ns` or
`namespace` - just use `nspace` and everything will be fine :)
