Reactive Data

In addition to request and cache management, WarpDrive provides a reactive access layer for data in the cache.

Data in the cache is conceptualized as belonging to one of three forms

• Documents - the response to a request
• Resources - a unique cacheable entity within the response to a request
• Fields - the data for an individual property on a resource

Each form of data can be accessed and managed reactively through one of two modes

• (upcoming, default in v6) PolarisMode
• (current, default in v5) LegacyMode

These modes are interopable. The reactive object (record) for a resource in PolarisMode can relate to a record in LegacyMode and vice-versa. This interopability is true whether the record in LegacyMode is a ReactiveResource or a Model.

These reactive primitives use fine-grained signals-based reactivity. The specific implementation used is pluggable and can be integrated with any implementation or even multiple at once.

For Ember, we use glimmer's implementation of Signal (@tracked) and Computed (@cached), though the integration does not have to be an implementation of signals at all! For instance, react could be integrated by utilizing useSyncExternalStore in place of signals and subscribing to all potential changes via the notification manager.