creating

In any application, you will often times find yourself in need of having some things in your database. Otherwise...I mean... what are we doing here? Snarcasm aside, Dream provides many different ways to insert records into the database, depending on what you are doing and why.

Dream.create

When looking for a clean, direct way to get something into a table in your database, look no further than the static Dream.create method. As reliable as your cat stealing your spot as soon as you get up (it turns out, you were stealing their spot), the create method will provide you with a simple, type-protected way to safely insert attributes into the database.

import User from 'app/models/user'

const user = await User.create({
  email: 'hello@world.biz',
  password: 'fishandfriends',
})

When using the static create method, the BeforeCreate, BeforeSave, AfterCreate, AfterSave, AfterCreateCommit, and AfterSaveCommit hooks will all fire, enabling lifecycle events defined in your model layer to kick off additional changes to your application's ecosystem.

Dream#save

Sometimes, you may find yourself wanting to slowly build up attributes, or just making change to one field, conditionally. This is the perfect time to leverage the Dream#save method!

const user = User.new()

if (thing1) {
  user.email = 'hello@world.biz'
} else {
  user.email = 'goodbye@cruelworld'
}

await user.save()

Dream also provides two methods to use for a locate-or-create pattern:

using "findOrCreateBy"

Utilizing findOrCreateBy, we can either collect a record if it exists, or else create it. Any fields passed into the createWith option will be applied only if the record is being created.

const user = await User.findOrCreateBy(
  { email: 'how@yadoin' },
  { createWith: { password: 'mypassword' } },
)

using "createOrFindBy"

The createOrFindBy method is very similar to findOrCreateBy, except it will attempt to create the record first. This pattern relies on unique contraints at the DB level to reject the create statement if another record already exists with those fields.

// this expects that the `email` column with have a unique contraint in the DB
const user = await User.createOrFindBy(
  { email: 'how@yadoin' },
  { createWith: { password: 'mypassword' } },
)