How to insert a new record with relations?

[deleteman]

I have ModelA that hasMany ModelB elements, how do I insert a new modelA with the associations already there for modelB? Or how do I associate the new record with the records of ModelB after the first one is saved?

Thanks!

[rainulf]

It's not documented properly, but it's there. Whenever you do an association, accessors such as get, set, has, and del are added.

var Person = db.define('person', {
    name : String
});
var Animal = db.define('animal', {
    name : String
});
Animal.hasOne("owner", Person); // assumes column 'owner_id' in 'animal' table

// get animal with id = 123
Animal.get(123, function (err, Foo) {
    // Foo has getOwner(), setOwner(), hasOwner(), etc.
});

You can check the source here; usage in the test files here.

[dxg]

I'm starting to think we need a wiki..

[gaudecker]

Did I misunderstand the original question? Is there a way to set the associations when calling create on a model?

Animal.create([{
  name: 'kittycat',
  owner: personInstance
}], ...

Of course the example given by @rainulf gave works, but I think it'd be much cleaner this way.

[dresende]

There's no option to create several instances of different models in one call, but you can create the instances manually and when you call .save() on the top one it should propagate.

var Person = db.define('person', {
    name : String
});
var Animal = db.define('animal', {
    name : String
});
Animal.hasOne("owner", Person);

// ...

var John = new Person({ name: "John" });
var Deco = new Animal({ name: "Deco" });
Deco.setOwner(John, function () {
    // John should be saved (to fetch it's ID) and also Deco should be saved
});

[dresende]

I'm going to try this in a couple of minutes. If I'm successful I'll post an example.

[dresende]

You should now be able to do something like:

var John = new Person({
    name: "John",
    surname: "Doe",
    pets: [ new Pet({ name: "Deco" }), ... ]
});
John.save(function (err) {
    // assuming Person.hasMany("pets", Pet), Deco should be saved, so as John
});

[ptnplanet]

Awesome!

[dresende]

I'm going to close this for now. I'll add some tests a few tiny tweaks in the meantime.