Idea: Deep creation of nested objects

[torgeros]

Disclaimer: This is just an idea, not an active request!

---

It would be very helpful to be able to create nested objects in one go.

An example would be a reservation system with named guests:

registration {email}
guest {firstName, lastName}

current state of GET

When getting the registration, you can already use .with(['guests']) to include the guests.

And you will get this object:

{
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "guests": [
    {
      "firstName": "a",
      "lastName": "b"
    }
  ]
}

current state of POST

When creating the registration, you need to:

• create the registration
• create each guest (separately)

In a worst-case, if any of these fail their validation, you would need to delete the created entries now.

target feature for POSTing

create everything in go:

// POST .../registrations

// body:
{
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "guests": [
    {
      "firstName": "a",
      "lastName": "b"
    }
  ]
}

And because I cannot emphasize this enough:
The most important part of this is the validation.
It would not be a huge burden to, on top of the CRUD base, implement this as an endpoint manually.
BUT, that would also mean that every field in these objects needs to be manually validated (required, isEmail, ...).

[torgeros]

For good measure, this is what an undocumented, unvalidated endpoint for this looks as an endpoint-extension:

module.exports = async (req, res, manifest) => {
  const { name, email, attendance, guests } = req.body;

  //TODO validate everything

  let guestIds = [];

  for (const g in guests) {
    g = await manifest.from("guests").create(g);
    guestIds.push(g.id);
  }

  const newRegistration = await manifest.from("registrations").create({
    name: name,
    email: email,
    attendance: attendance,
    guestIds: guestIds,
  });

  res.json({ newRegistration });
};

[brunobuddy]

@torgeros good point, I have to see how each DB manages cascades on create/update to see what are the expected behaviors

[brunobuddy]

Cascade deletions also were asked on Discord