[v5] BelongsTo, preloading and associate() question

[42pe]

So... I'm going to try to explain this, bear with me, I'm new at Adonis.

I have a ProjectOwner Model (basically a "Company" so to speak), where I have a relationship to User as who owns it:

@belongsTo(() => User, { localKey: 'id', foreignKey: 'user_id' })
  public owner: BelongsTo<typeof User>

Question: Association

When doing this:

const po = await ProjectOwner.create(data)
      po.related('owner').associate(user)

I couldn't get it to associate a new ProjectOwner without defining the user_id column in the model, besides the relationship, as such:

  @column()
  protected user_id: number

Without that I got the following error:
E_MISSING_MODEL_ATTRIBUTE: "ProjectOwner.owner" expects "user_id" to exist on "ProjectOwner" model, but is missing

So, ¿Is it correct that I need to add the column used_id besides defining the relationship?

[thetutlage]

Yes, the model needs the foreignKeys to be available on the model itself. Infact, the foreignKey property inside relationship options is the name of the property on the model and not the table.

To summarize it, Models form relationships with each other and not the database tables.

[42pe]

Clear as water, thank you so much!

[jonathanestefani]

Is it possible to make a composite key?

[thetutlage]

Nope. Composite keys are not possible as of now. It requires a lot of changes acorss the entire codebase and I am not planning to invest time for that right now.

[jonathanestefani]

An example:

@belongsTo(() => Invoices, { localKey: ['company_id, 'branch', 'store'], foreignKey: ['company_id, 'branch', 'store'] })
public orders: BelongsTo

[tuxaanand]

I've just started with AdonisJS. Thank you all for such a beautiful framework.

In KeysExtractor, I tried adding the column dynamically if the attribute doesn't exist already as follows and it worked.

Would it be possible to incorporate this behavior into Lucid? Will this impact anything else?

      let attribute = model.$getColumn(key)

      if (!attribute) {
        model.$addColumn(key, {})
        attribute = model.$getColumn(key)
        if (!attribute) {
          throw new Exception(
            `"${relationRef}" expects "${key}" to exist on "${model.name}" model, but is missing`,
            500,
            'E_MISSING_MODEL_ATTRIBUTE'
          )
        }
      }