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Waterline Models

Models represent a structure of data which requires persistent storage. The data may live in any data-store but is interfaced in the same way. This allows your users to live in PostgreSQL and your user preferences to live in MongoDB and you will interact with the data models in the exact same way.

If you're using MySQL, a model might correspond to a table. If you're using MongoDB, it might correspond to a collection. In either case, our goal is to provide a simple, modular way of managing data without relying on any one type of database.

See Also

How to define a model

Model definitions contain attributes, validations, instance methods, lifecycle callbacks and class methods. To define a model you will extend the Waterline.Collection object and add in your own attributes and methods.

By default an attribute named id will be automatically added to your model which will contain an auto-incrementing number unique to each record. This will be your model's primary key and will be indexed when available. You can override this if you would like to define your own primary key factory or attribute.

Each model will also get two timestamp attributes added by default: createdAt and updatedAt which will track when a record went into the datastore and when it was last updated.

var Person = Waterline.Collection.extend({

  // Identity is a unique name for this model and must be in lower case
  identity: 'person',

  // Connection
  // A named connection which will be used to read/write to the datastore
  connection: 'local-postgresql',

  // Attributes are basic pieces of information about a model
  attributes: {
    firstName: 'string',
    lastName: 'string',
    age: 'integer',
    birthDate: 'date',
    emailAddress: 'email'
  }
});

module.exports = Person;

You can also set options for each attribute. These include validations and any indexing or unique properties.

var Person = Waterline.Collection.extend({

  identity: 'person',
  connection: 'local-postgresql',

  attributes: {

    // Don't allow two objects with the same value
    lastName: {
      type: 'string',
      unique: true
    },

    // Ensure a value is set
    age: {
      type: 'integer',
      required: true
    },

    // Set a default value if no value is set
    phoneNumber: {
      type: 'string',
      defaultsTo: '111-222-3333'
    },

    // Create an auto-incrementing value (not supported by all data-stores)
    incrementMe: {
      type: 'integer',
      autoIncrement: true
    },

    // Index a value for faster queries
    emailAddress: {
      type: 'email', // Email type will get validated by the ORM
      index: true
    }
  }
});

Using an existing database

There might be times when you want to use an existing database in your models.

It is extremely important to set the migrate property to safe in your models when working with existing databases. If you do not to this, you will very likely lose data and do other terrible things as it tries to automatically adjust the schema.

In this example, the WB Company has prefixed all of their fields with wb_. You'll notice that you can use the tableName attribute, but also columnName in the attributes object.

var Widget = Waterline.Collection.extend({
  identity: 'wbwidget',
  connection: 'wb-widget-database',
  tableName: 'wb_widgets',
  attributes: {
    id: {
      type: 'integer',
      columnName: 'wb_id',
      primaryKey: true
    },
    name: {
      type: 'string',
      columnName: 'wb_name'
    },
    description: {
      type: 'text',
      columnName: 'wb_description'
    }
    migrate: 'safe',
    autoPK: false,
    autoCreatedAt: false,
    autoUpdatedAt: false,
  }
});

In addition, settings for automatically generating the primary key field (autoPK), the created timestamp (autoCreatedAt), and the modified timestamp (autoUpdatedAt) are disabled in this example because either the model specifies them specifically, or they are actually absent from the existing database table.

Model property summary

All of these properties can be set as global defaults, or can be individually set in each model.

Property Value Default Description
connection string - The name of the connection to use for the model.
identity string - The programmatic name for the model.
tableName string - Use a custom database table/collection name rather than inferring it from the name of the model.
migrate string alter Sets the schema to automatically alter the schema, drop the schema or make no changes (safe).
autoPK boolean true Automatically add an id attribute to the model to be the primary key.
autoCreatedAt date Current time Automatically add a createdAt date attribute to the model.
autoUpdatedAt date The created time Automatically add a updatedAt date attribute to the model.