Using non-trivial REST API and Ember

We're new to Ember, and our intended (ember-cli) app first works by opening a project (which we can think of a JSON object), and then acting on various sections of that project with various functions. We have this "pick your project first" approach neatly encapsulated in a Django REST api structure, e.g.

1. /projects/ lists all projects


2. /projects/1/ gives information about project 1


3. /projects/1/sectionA/ list all elements in sectionA of project 1


4. /projects/1/sectionA/2/ gives information about element 2 of sectionA in project 1


5. /projects/1/sectionA/2/sectionB/... and so on.

We made relatively good progress with the first two points in Ember using ember-data and this.store('project').find(...) etc. However, we've come unstuck trying to add further to our url (e.g. points 3., 4., and 5.). I believe our issues come from routing and handling multiple models (e.g. project and sectionA).

The question: what is the best way to structure the routes in Ember.js to match a non-trivial REST API, and use ember-data similarly?

Comments:

1. the "Ember way", and stuff working out of the box is preferred. Custom adapters and .getJSON might work, but we're not sure if we'll then lose out on what Ember offers.


2. we want the choice of project to affect the main app template. E.g. if a project does not have "sectionA", then a link to "sectionA" is not displayed in the main app. And, if the project does have "sectionA", we need the link to be to e.g. "/project/1/sectionA", i.e. dependant on the project open.


3. This seems similar to handling users (i.e. first I must "pick a user" and then continue), where the problem is solved outside of the URL (and is similar to using sessions as we have done in the past). However, we specifically want the project ID to be inside the URL, to remain stateless.

Bonus questions (if relevant):

1. how would we structure the models? Do we need to use hasMany/belongsTo and, if so, is this equivalent to just loading the whole project JSON in the first place?


2. can ember-data handle such complex requests? I.e. "give me item 2 from sectionA of project 1"? Can it do this "in one go", or do there have to be nested queries (i.e. "first give me project 1" and then from this "give me sectionA" and then from this "give me item 1")?

Finally, apologies if this is documented well somewhere. We've spent nearly a week trying to figure this out and have tried our best to find resources -- it's possible we just don't know what we're looking for.