Save object with associations in Sequelizejs

Question

As far as I can tell, using Sequelizejs, there does not seem to be a way to save object associations when the object itself is saved.

For example, I have a contact which can have 1 or more phoneNumber. Currently I have something like this for the association:

global.db.Contact.hasMany(global.db.PhoneNumber, {as: 'phoneNumbers'});

Using a rest endpoint I would like to post a new contact object (with any provided phone numbers) and save it to the database. My request object looks something like this:

{
    firstName: "john",
    lastName: "Doe",
    phoneNumbers: [
        { number: "555-555-5555", type: "home" }
    ]
}

Right now I pass this object to build:

var contact = Contact.build(req.body);

And then call save (I know I could use create instead of build/save but we have custom logic in the save to track the modified data and which user did the modification)

contact.save();

This throws the following error which kind of makes sense.

column "phoneNumbers" of relation "Contacts" does not exist

The sql call is trying to set the value of a column "phoneNumbers" which does not exist. I obviously don't want it to do that... I really would like it to bulk create each phoneNumber in the array with the ID of the contact I am creating.

The only example I found was this: https://gist.github.com/sdepold/3040391 and I don't really want to have to do this... Since I coming from a rest endpoint, I would like a way to do this operation generically (I'll have many models with associations). I will also need to be able to do these operations in bulk (for importing contacts from other sources) so I would prefer that it be the minimal amount of sql calls. Has anyone found a good way to do this?

Answer 1

Sequelize v4 introduced a new feature which allows creation of an instance along with any associated instances.

In your case, it allows adding multiple phone number against a single user as provided below.

return Contact.create({
  firstName: 'John',
  lastName: 'Doe',
  PhoneNumbers: [
    {
      number: '555-555-5555',
      type: 'home'
    },
    {
      number: '555-555-7777',
      type: 'work'
    }
  ]  
}, {
  include: [{
    association: Product.PhoneNumber
  }]
});

Detailed documentation can be found here Sequelize Docs - Creating with associations