Thinky.io hasMany not saving new model instances

Question

I am struggling with joining my User and Job Models using Thinky.io.

In the docs, there is an example here of how hasMany works to attach posts to an author. I would like the same set-up for our users: each user would ideally have a job field that saved all the jobs they are interested in. This is how I've set up the User-Job relationship: User.hasMany(Job, 'jobs', 'id', 'userId'). This is as far as I've gotten with my add Job function:

module.exports.addJob = function*(next) {
  this.type = 'application/json';
  var user = yield User.get("473ade1a-d2df-4618-9a53-ed68fa98f169").run();
  const joins = yield User.get(user.id).getJoin().run();

  const jobData = yield parse(this);
  const job = new Job(jobData);
  user.jobs = job; 
  var userJoined = yield user.saveAll({jobs: true});

This is just setting user.jobs to whatever current job the user clicked on. I tried pushing the new job onto user.jobs, but that did not work either. I can see the information in the console, but this relationship does not get saved to the database as far as I can tell. Has anyone dealt with this issue before? I'm new to StackOverflow, so let me know how I can clarify my question. Thank you!

Answer 1

There are two ways to store the relationship you describe. You can attack the problem from the User side or the Job side. To me, Job seems more intuitive but I'll walk through both. The key to remember is that relationships are virtual. There isn't array of jobs on User that's stored in the database, it's just generated for you at runtime.

So, to store the Job, just do:

const job = new Job(jobData);
job.userId = user.id; // set the user id on the relationship
var savedJob = yield job.save();

So now job is saved in the database and associated with the user. If you were to run:

var user = yield User.get("473ade1a-d2df-4618-9a53-ed68fa98f169").getJoin().run();

user would contain an array with the one job you just ran. But maybe that's not what you want. If you want to be able to create and save the Job associated with the user in one go, you can go the route of the example, using saveAll but make sure you're saving an array, not just the job.

const job = new Job(jobData);
user.jobs = [job]; 
var userJoined = yield user.saveAll({jobs: true});

You said you tried pushing the job. Can you share what that code looks like, if you're still having trouble?