Sequelize REST API generator

Question

I am developing a Nodejs application and my database is Postgres and I am using Sequelize as my ORM because of its excellent support for migrations.

I am on the lookout for a good REST API generator based on the schema I have defined. There are two main hurdles I am facing and they are that the generators don't do a good job of creating association API routes and lack of ACL support. On the associations front, my schema has multiple levels of association i.e. for example..

Student.hasMany(Courses);
Courses.hasMany(Subjects);

So ideally the generated REST API should be something like

/student/:student_id/course/:course_id/subject/:subjectId

I found a few projects that are doing this, but are incomplete.

• https://github.com/sequelize/sequelize-restful - is good but does not have ACL support
• https://www.npmjs.org/package/restizr - is in alpha stage and does not generate API routes for associations.

Is there any module that supports this?

Answer 1

What you were doing here is writing a webservice without a domain model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemic_domain_model Ofc. you have every right to do it, but I wonder if you really understood what a webservice means. https://stackoverflow.com/a/1530607/607033 It is not a database with CRUD HTTP interface normally, though nowadays it is popular doing something this way and call it REST. A response to a REST HTTP request is a viewmodel https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/425001/65755 and it contains not just data, but a lot of metadata and hyperlinks. A REST API is a special type of webservice with many constraints. https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dissertation.pdf http://www.markus-lanthaler.com/research/hydra-a-vocabulary-for-hypermedia-driven-web-apis.pdf Your ORM is used 2 layers deeper in the data layer and it has nothing to do with the presentation layer where your REST API should be. I really wonder why people are making applications, which are doing nothing except serving data directly from the database and use the most inconvenient technology to do it. I guess there are databases nowadays with ACL and REST API support, so all you need is just using them. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/sql/ Or there was something for PgSQL and Nodejs too around the time you asked this. https://github.com/QBisConsult/psql-api