Save object with associations in Sequelizejs

Question

As far as I can tell using Sequelizejs, it seems that there is no way to preserve associations of objects when the object itself is saved.

For example, I have a contact that can have 1 or more phone numbers. I currently have something like this for an association:

global.db.Contact.hasMany(global.db.PhoneNumber, {as: 'phoneNumbers'}); 

Using the vacation endpoint, I would like to publish a new contact object (with any provided phone numbers) and save it in the database. My request object looks something like this:

 { firstName: "john", lastName: "Doe", phoneNumbers: [ { number: "555-555-5555", type: "home" } ] } 

Now I am passing this object to the assembly:

 var contact = Contact.build(req.body); 

And then call save (I know that I could use create instead of build / save, but we have user logic in save to track the changed data and which user made the modification)

 contact.save(); 

This causes the following error, which makes sense.

 column "phoneNumbers" of relation "Contacts" does not exist 

A sql call attempts to set the value of the "phoneNumbers" column, which does not exist. Obviously, I do not want this to be done ... I really would like for each telephone number in the array to be created in bulk with the identifier of the contact I am creating.

The only example I found was the following: https://gist.github.com/sdepold/3040391 , and I really do not want to do this ... Since I am starting from the resting point, I would like to do this operation in general (I will have many models with associations). I will also need to do these operations in bulk (to import contacts from other sources), so I would prefer that this be the minimum number of sql calls. Has anyone found a good way to do this?

Answer 1

I am using this code

 var createUser = function(req, reply) { db.User.create(req.payload).success(function(user) { saveGroups(req, reply, user); }).error(function(err) { console.error('Error occured', err); reply('Error'); }); }; var saveGroups = function(req, reply, user) { db.UserGroup.destroy("user_id=" + user.id).success(function() { var groups = req.payload.userGroups; if (groups && groups.length > 0) { for (var i = 0; i < groups.length; i++) { groups[i].user_id = user.id; } db.UserGroup.bulkCreate(groups).success(function() { reply(user); }).error(function(err) { console.error('Error occured', err); reply('Error'); }); } else { reply(user); } }).error(function(err) { console.error('Error occured', err); reply('Error'); }); }; 

• A user is a model that has a Many UserGroup.
• req.payload comes json
• destroy (...) to remove associations first (in case we do an update)

Answer 2

Sequelize v4 introduces a new feature that allows you to create an instance along with all related instances.

In your case, this allows you to add multiple phone numbers against one user, as described below.

 return Contact.create({ firstName: 'John', lastName: 'Doe', PhoneNumbers: [ { number: '555-555-5555', type: 'home' }, { number: '555-555-7777', type: 'work' } ] }, { include: [{ association: Product.PhoneNumber }] }); 

Detailed documentation can be found here Sequelize Docs - Creating with Associations