DjORMgo-js

DjORMgo-js is a simple, django-inspired ORM for Node, that aims to fill properties, map joins, and handle basic insertions.

Install

yarn add djormgo-js or npm i --save djormgo-js

Examples

import {Model, FieldType, Field} from "djormgo-js";

class User extends Model {
  constructor() {
      super({
        tableName: "users", // By default, the table name is assumed to be the 
        // lowercase form of the model name, i.e. in this case if tableName were
        // undefined it would default to "user"
        fields: [
            {name: "id", type: FieldType.AUTO},
            {name: "username", type: FieldType.VARCHAR},
            {name: "active", type: FieldType.BOOL, /*default: true*/},
            {name: "created", type: FieldType.DATE, /*default: () => new Date()*/}
        ]
      })
  }
}

const userDAO = new User();

const bob = await userDAO.get({username: "bob"});
console.log(bob.active); // true
bob.active = false;
await userDAO.update(bob);


const someUsers = await userDAO.filter({active: true})
console.log(someUsers[0].username); // sally

const earlyUsers = await userDAO.filter({id__lte: 50});
// returns all users whose id is <= 50

DjORMgo aims to provide a reliable way to achieve 80% of database work, while supporting an easy RawQuery interface for more complicated queries. For example:

import {RawQuery} from "djormgo-js";

const users = await userDAO.filter(
    new RawQuery(
        "SELECT * FROM users WHERE active = $1 AND created > $2 OR username IN ($3, $4)", 
        [true, new Date(), 'bob', 'sally']
    )
);
console.log(users.length); // 21

userDAO.insert({username: "bobette"});

In the previous example, the fields active and created used their default values, while the field id was ignored due to it being an auto-increment field.

Ways that DjORMgo-js is different from Django's ORM

No migration management

DjORMgo does not provide migration management, but does require schema definitions in the form of classes extending Model.

As such, it will throw errors whenever a field does not match the expected type, rather than trying to continue operation in an unexpected state.

This is a vast improvement on running raw queries with client.query, where a change to a column won't throw an error until certain branches of code are executed utilising that column in an unsupported way.

No QuerySets

As it stands, DjORMgo does not build a lazily evaluated queryset. The query is executed as soon as the function is called. While this unfortunately means it can't be used for very complicated queries such as sub selectors, it's useful for 80% of use cases.

The philosophy of this project is to quickly provide support for 80% of use cases, and support them very well

The ecosystem for NodeJS ORM's is young, and a lot of projects start with ambitious goals, and as such are built to support complex operations, but development loses momentum before these API's mature. This project takes the opposite approach, make the bulk of database work very easy, but leave the complex stuff for later.

No prefetched joins, yet

DjORMgo-js doesn't support pre-fetching models via related fields, however this would be a nice feature to have.

Queries return an object matching a model schema, not a model instance

Django's ORM will instantiate a model instance with the fields prefilled. NodeJS returns a plain object guaranteed to conform to the model's schema. For now this is simply a design decision, feel free to convince me otherwise.