observing belongsTo never fires

[atomkirk]

We are stuck on Ember Data 3.1 because we have something like this:

model/payment.js

export default Model.extend({
  debitChartAccount: DS.belongsTo('chartAccount'),
})

components/payment-form.js

model.set('debitChartAccount', account)

components/payment-form.hbs

{{#chart-account-select initial=model.debitChartAccount as |choice|}}
  {{choice.name}}
{{/chart-account-select}}

components/chart-account-select.js

export default Component.extend({
  _observeInitial: on('init', observer('initial', function() {
    console.log('got called')
  })),
})

For some reason _observeInitial is not getting called when I do model.set('debitChartAccount', account)

I tried really hard to make a simple app that reproduced this and I couldn't so there must be something specific with my app going on. But this worked find in 3.1 and stopped working in 3.2 (with no changes to my app outside of ember init changes).

Is there any advice you can offer to help me reproduce errors like this? Are there any changes in 3.1 -> 3.2 that stand out to you as a possible cause?

[runspired]

There is a PromiseProxy for the relationship because it is async. We used to blow away the proxy too often, now the proxy is relatively stable and only blown away when absolutely needed. I don't know for sure that this is the issue, but we should be notifying the property regardless.

[atomkirk]

Any ideas how I can test if thats the issue? I even called

model.set('debitChartAccount', account)
model.notifyPropertyChange('debitChartAccount')

and the observer STILL didn't fire. Very strange. Again, this worked on 3.1 and I changed nothing except the ember-data version to 3.2

[runspired]

The more I think about this, the more I think we need to return to an unstable proxy for belongsTo bc it's either that or it is likely that when updating a belongsTo we also need to invalidate every watched key to deal with how the referential comparison prevents the changes from propagating deeper into template hierarchies in several commonly used (but not necessarily ideal :P ) patterns.

[runspired]

I should be able to produce a twiddle showing the rough outlines of the issue here sans ember-data

[atomkirk]

That would be SO GREAT! This is keeping us on 3.1 which is causing us to get very behind. If theres something i can do to help debug I’d love to. I can perhaps point the backend to our production servers and share our codebase with you to show you a full reproduction if the probelm… let me know

[runspired]

@atomkirk still stuck? if so I'd love to help, if not I'd like to close.

[atomkirk]

We just rewrote it. Can close

[sly7-7]

Thank you @atomkirk for the feedback. Were you able to finally upgrade ember-data too ?