What is populate in SailsJs?

Question

I recently began to develop on sailsJs and not understanding the subtleties Please explain to me what is populate in SailsJs and who can please do simple example Thanks in advance ? whats is ?

User.find({ name: 'foo' })
.populate('pets', { name: 'fluffy' })
.exec(function(err, users) {
  if(err) return res.serverError(err);
  res.json(users);
});

Answer 1

populate is used for associations. When your model is something like this:

// User.js
module.exports = {
  attributes: {

    name: {
      type: "string"
    },

    pet: {
      model: "pet"
    }

  }
}

Here pet attribute of user collection is a reference to pet table. In user table it will store only the id column of pet. However, when you do a populate while find, then it will fetch the entire record of the pet entry and display it here. This is just for one to one association. You can have many to one associations as well as many to many. See this documentation for more details