Dynamic model discovery: "Swagger: skipping unknown type" error - no schema defined in Swagger UI

[twboc]

Swagger cannot process dynamically discovered models on boot time which ends in a situation that Model schema is undefined in the swagger UI.

Swagger: skipping unknown type 'ModelType'

PACKAGE:

{
"compression": "^1.0.3",
"cors": "^2.5.2",
"helmet": "^1.3.0",
"loopback": "^3.17.0",
"loopback-boot": "^3.1.0",
"loopback-swagger" : "^5.5.0",
"loopback-component-explorer": "^5.2.0",
"serve-favicon": "^2.0.1",
"strong-error-handler": "^2.0.0"
}

CODE:

'use strict';

var loopback = require('loopback');
var boot = require('loopback-boot');

var app = module.exports = loopback({localRegistry: true});

var ds = loopback.createDataSource('postgresql', {
  "host": "localhost",
  "port": 5432,
  "database": "db",
  "username": "user",
  "password": "pass"
});

var acceptedTables = [
  'users',
  'organisation',
  'expectation',
  'location',
  'tags',
  'telephone',
  'email',
  'experience',
  'project',
  'skill',
  'education',
  'language',
  'activity',
  'hobby',
  'social',
  'link',
  'document',
  'user_organisation',
  'users_data',
  'document_permissions',
  'tag_relations'
]

var modelDefinitionsConf = {views: true};
var modelConfig = { schema: 'public' };

function capitalizeFirstLetter(string) {
    return string.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + string.slice(1);
}

function generateModelName(modelName){
  var nameArr = modelName.split(/_|-/);
  var nameArr = nameArr.map(function(el){ return el[0].toUpperCase() + el.substr(1); });
  return nameArr.join('');
}

app.start = function() {
  return app.listen(function() {
    app.emit('started');
    var baseUrl = app.get('url').replace(/\/$/, '');
    ds.discoverModelDefinitions(modelDefinitionsConf, function(err, data){
      for (var el in data) {
        (function(modelName){
          if (acceptedTables.indexOf(modelName) >= 0) {
              ds.discoverSchema(modelName, function (err, schema) {
                var model = ds.createModel(schema.name, schema.properties, schema.options);
                app.model(model, {public : true, dataSource: ds });
              })
          }
        })(data[el].name)
      }
    });
    if (app.get('loopback-component-explorer')) {
      var explorerPath = app.get('loopback-component-explorer').mountPath;
      console.log('Browse your REST API at %s%s', baseUrl, explorerPath);
    }
  });
};

// Bootstrap the application, configure models, datasources and middleware.
// Sub-apps like REST API are mounted via boot scripts.
boot(app, __dirname, function(err) {
  if (err) throw err;

  // start the server if `$ node server.js`
  if (require.main === module)
    app.start();
});

[jannyHou]

@twboc Unfortunately in LoopBack3 you could not load the dynamically built model in swagger, this is limited by the boot module: swagger is one of the built-in plugins that get executed before any boot script files, and also before function app.start, as you can see from the code

boot(app, __dirname, function(err) {
  if (err) throw err;

  // start the server if `$ node server.js`
  if (require.main === module)
    app.start();
});

Now the team is working on a new version of LoopBack, and the boot implementation is about to start, please see story:
loopbackio/loopback-next#441

We appreciate your suggested feature and will see if we can make it happen in the next version of the boot module!

I am closing the issue here, we can keep discussion of possibility in loopbackio/loopback-next#441, feel free to reopen it if you have other questions, thanks for understanding.

[prateek-raj]

I got a solution by defining the custom model in model-config with options

"custom_model": {
 "dataSource": null,
"public": false
}

Hope this might help. This worked for me :P