Self-referential relationships (friends of users) in ember-data

Question

In Rails 4.0 backend I have the following:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :friendships, dependent: :destroy
  has_many :friends, through: :friendships

class Friendship < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :friend, class_name: User
end

I want to pass the user's friend list into JSON, so I write a serializer:

class UserSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer
  embed :ids, include: true
  has_many :friends, include: true

On the ember-side, I'm trying to load the JSON with the following User model:

Nektere.User = DS.Model.extend
  friends: DS.hasMany('user')

but this gives me an error

Assertion failed: No model was found for 'friend'
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set property 'typeKey' of undefined 

It's asking me for a Friend model, but a Friend is a User. I'm guessing I need to tell ember-data that the friends array is actually an array of User records, but if friends: DS.hasMany('user') doesn't do it, then I don't know how. How do I load this data structure properly into ember?

Answer 1

In AMS you can specify the root, in your case the root for your friends relationship would be users, something like this should work

has_many :friends, include: true, root: :users