Using sequelize.js to interface against existing database?

Question

I'm currently working in a project where our Node.js server will perform a lot of interactions against an existing MySQL database. Thus I'm wondering if Sequelize is a good library to interface the database. From what I've read about it, it is most often used as a master of the database. But in my case it will only have select,insert,delete access and not access to modify and create tables and so on. Does Sequelize support this method of interaction with a database?

If Sequelize does indeed work good for this, what settings do i need to disable to not run into much trouble? After reading their documentation i could not find any global settings to turn it into a simple interface tool. Timestamps and such could be disabled on table definition but not globally what I saw. Any input is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

There are a lot of questions in this post, I'll try to answer them all:

Disable timestamps globally:

new Sequelize(... ,{
  define: {
    timestamps: false
  }
});

You can pass any define options to the sequelize constructor and they will be applied to all calls to sequelize.define

Mapping to an existing database

I'll try to describe some common cases here:

I want my model to have a different name to my database table:

sequelize.define('name of model', attributes, {
   tableName: 'name of table'
});

My database columns are called something different than the attributes in my model:

sequelize.define('name of model', {
  name_of_attribute_in_model: {
    type: ...
    field: 'name of field in table'
  }
});

My primary key is not called id:

sequelize.define('name of model', {
  a_field_totally_not_called_id: {
     primaryKey: true // also allows for composite primary keys, even though the support for composite keys accross associations is spotty
     autoIncrement: true
  }
});

My foreign keys are called something different

X.belongsTo(Y, { foreignKey: 'something_bla' });

disclaimer: I am a sequelize maintainer :). Overall I think we have pretty good support for working with legacy DBs. Feel free to ask more questions here or on irc://irc.freenode.net#sequelizejs