Inheritance and relationships between collections in mongoDB - node.js

Using MongoDB/mongoose/typegoose and typesCript, I have some user , car and phone models where I need to have as an attribute of user, an array with the products (car and phone) that are related to it. You could use populate but you would need to make one for each product. It is not clear to me how inheritance is handled in MongoDB so that my project is scalable.

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How to handle Persistence with Rich Domain Model

I am redesigning my NodeJS application because I want to use the Rich Domain Model concept. Currently I am using Anemic Domain Model and this is not scaling well, I just see 'ifs' everywhere.
I have read a bunch of blog posts and DDD related blogs, but there is something that I simply cannot understand... How do we handle Persistence properly.
To start, I would like to describe the layers that I have defined and their purpose:
Persistence Model
Defines the Table Models. Defines the Table name, Columns, Keys and Relations
I am using Sequelize as ORM, so the Models defined with Sequelize are considered my Persistence Model
Domain Model
Entities and Behaviors. Objects that correspond to the abstractions created as part of the Business Domain
I have created several classes and the best thing here is that I can benefit from hierarchy to solve all problems (without loads of ifs yay).
Data Access Object (DAO)
Responsible for the Data management and conversion of entries of the Persistence Model to entities of the Domain Model. All persistence related activities belong to this layer
In my case DAOs work on top of the Sequelize models created on the Persistence Model, however, I am serializing the records returned on Database Interactions in different objects based on their properties. Eg.: If I have a Table with a column called 'UserType' that contains two values [ADMIN,USER], when I select entries on this table, I would serialize the return according to the User Type, so a User with Type: ADMIN would be an instance of the AdminUser class where a User with type: USER would simply be a DefaultUser...
Service Layer
Responsible for all Generic Business Logic, such as Utilities and other Services that are not part of the behavior of any of the Domain Objects
Client Layer
Any Consumer class that plays around with the Objects and is responsible in triggering the Persistence
Now the confusion starts when I implement the Client Layer...
Let's say I am implementing a new REST API:
POST: .../api/CreateOrderForUser/
{
items: [{
productId: 1,
quantity: 4
},{
productId: 3,
quantity: 2
}]
}
On my handler function I would have something like:
function(oReq){
var oRequestBody = oReq.body;
var oCurrentUser = oReq.user; //This is already a Domain Object
var aOrderItems = oRequestBody.map(function(mOrderData){
return new OrderItem(mOrderData); //Constructor sets the properties internally
});
var oOrder = new Order({
items: aOrderItems
});
oCurrentUser.addOrder(oOrder);
// So far so good... But how do I persist whatever
// happened above? Should I call each DAO for each entity
// created? Like, first create the Order, then create the
// Items, then update the User?
}
One way I found to make it work is to merge the Persistence Model and the Domain Model, which means that oCurrentUser.addOrder(...) would execute the business logic required and would call the OrderDAO to persist the Order along with the Items in the end. The bad thing about this is that now the addOrder also have to handle transactions, because I don't want to add the order without the items, or update the User without the Order.
So, what I am missing here?
Aggregates.
This is the missing piece on the story.
In your example, there would likely not be a separate table for the order items (and no relations, no foreign keys...). Items here seem to be values (describing an entity, ie: "45 USD"), and not entities (things that change in time and we track, ie: A bank account). So you would not directly persist OrderItems but instead, persist only the Order (with the items in it).
The piece of code I would expect to find in place of your comment could look like orderRepository.save(oOrder);. Additionally, I would expect the user to be a weak reference (by id only) in the order, and not orders contained in a user as your oCurrentUser.addOrder(oOrder); code suggests.
Moreover, the layers you describe make sense, but in your example you mix delivery concerns (concepts like request, response...) with domain concepts (adding items to a new order), I would suggest that you take a look at established patterns to keep these concerns decoupled, such as Hexagonal Architecture. This is especially important for unit testing, as your "client code" will likely be the test instead of the handler function. The retrieve/create - do something - save code would normally be a function in an Application Service describing your use case.
Vaughn Vernon's "Implementing Domain-Driven Design" is a good book on DDD that would definitely shed more light on the topic.

Mongoose: Schema vs Model?

When looking at tutorials there is often a delineation between a schema and a model, particularly when dealing with mongoose/mongodb.
This makes porting over to postgresql somewhat confusing, as 'models' don't seem to exist under that system. What is the difference the two approaches?
For example, what would be a postgres/sql ORM equivalent of this line?
(mongoose and express.js):
var userSchema = schema.define('local', {
username: String,
password: String,
});
module.exports = mongoose.model('User', userSchema);
In mongoose, a schema represents the structure of a particular document, either completely or just a portion of the document. It's a way to express expected properties and values as well as constraints and indexes. A model defines a programming interface for interacting with the database (read, insert, update, etc). So a schema answers "what will the data in this collection look like?" and a model provides functionality like "Are there any records matching this query?" or "Add a new document to the collection".
In straight RDBMS, the schema is implemented by DDL statements (create table, alter table, etc), whereas there's no direct concept of a model, just SQL statements that can do highly flexible queries (select statements) as well as basic insert, update, delete operations.
Another way to think of it is the nature of SQL allows you to define a "model" for each query by selecting only particular fields as well as joining records from related tables together.
In other ORM systems like Ruby on Rails, the schema is defined via ActiveRecord mechanisms and the model is the extra methods your Model subclass adds that define additional business logic.
A schema is fundamentally describing the data construct of a
document (in MongoDB collection). This schema defines the name of each item of data, and the type of data, whether it is a string, number, date, Boolean, and so on.
A model is a compiled version of the schema. One instance of the model will map to one document in the database.
It is the model that handles the reading, creating, updating, and deleting of documents.
A document in a Mongoose collection is a single instance of a model. So it makes sense that if we're going to work with our data then it will be through the model.
A single instance of a model (like a User instance in var User = mongoose.model('User', userSchema);) maps directly to a single document in the database.
With this 1:1 relationship, it is the model that handles all document interaction - creating, reading, saving, and deleting. This makes the model a very powerful tool.
Taken from "Mongoose for Application Development", by Simon Holmes, 2013
I imagine models as classes created from a schema (maybe I am mistaken).
MongoDB stores everything in BSON , which is a binary format. A simple Hello World BSON document might look like this internally:
\x16\x00\x00\x00\x02hello\x00\x06\x00\x00\x00world\x00\x00. A computer can deal with all that mumbo-jumbo, but that's hard to read for humans. We want something we can easily understand, which is why developers have created the concept of a database model. A model is a representation of a database record as a nice object in your programming language of choice. In this case, our models will be JavaScript objects. Models can serve as simple objects that store database values, but they often have things like data validation, extra methods, and more. As you’ll see, Mongoose has a lot
of those features.
Taken from "Express in Action", by Evan Hahn, 2016
In Short:
A Mongoose model is a wrapper on the Mongoose schema. A Mongoose schema defines the structure of the document, default values, validators, etc., whereas a Mongoose model provides an interface to the database for creating, querying, updating, deleting records, etc.
Reference: Introduction to Mongoose for MongoDB - FCC

Service Stack and NHibernate

I am following this example: Using NHibernate with ServiceStack
In the Contacts class library is there way to not have to create another Product class since we already have the Model or is this required? Seems like dependency injection could be used here.
Also could I move the model and mappings into thier own class library outside of the Services project?
How would I return model that had a property that was another model? I.e. Say we had an employee model that was linked to a person model by Id and the person model contained the employee Date Of Birth, I am not seeing how I would return that.
You don't have to create seperate models (or DTOs), however, I think when dealing with different ORMs the custom DTOs will make life easier. You can easily translate the properties with ServiceStack's property translater or something like AutoMapper.
I would create your DTOs in the manner that you want others to consume them. In other words you DTO's don't need to align with the underlying tables. You can combine models and flatten the data into useful DTOs. In your example the Employee class could expose the date of birth and any other person properties.
You can easily keep your DTOs in a separate project. I have done this in projects where I wanted to re-use the DTO classes elsewhere without including the services.

Core Data - Predict to filter relationship subclass

I have an entity User entity which is a parent entity to a Friend entity.
The User entity has a to-many relationship with an entity named Article.
The idea is there are users saved and also friends (from Facebook), the to-many relationship to Article is set on the User entity as this is being subclassed by Friend.
My question is how can I request all Articles by Friends and not by all users ?
I am having trouble setting an Predict to omit User entities and keep only Friend entities.
Thanks.
Is there a reason you are building a parent/child entity design here? Parent/Child entities come with a really heavy cost if you are persisting to a sqlite store. It is almost always a better idea to just have a single entity and have a flag stating if it is a friend.
Also, I know of no way, at the database level, to filter out the parent from the child in this design. It can be done in memory after the fetch by requesting the entity.name but that will not turn into a sql call properly.

Migrating from Dictionary to Core Data Entity

I've got a data model where there is a Person entity, which has a transformable attribute which is an array of dictionaries containing information. The model is much bigger than that, this is just the part I'm having trouble with. It was designed this way by an old developer, and in taking over the project I need to migrate this to be 100% core data.
So what I need to do is create a new entity, then step through each dictionary in the Person's array and create new instances of that entity with the information from that dictionary. I thought I could use an NSEntityMigrationPolicy to set up a custom migration for this new Entity, but it seems the Core Data migration is expecting X number of source entities to translate to X number of destination entities. Because I technically have 0 source entities right now (because they're in an array that Core Data doesn't really know anything about), I'm not sure how I can make the migration create new entities during the process.
What, or rather where in the migration procedure, is the best way to do what I'm trying to accomplish? I've always used lightweight migration in the past, so this is my first adventure in custom migration.
It would help to have a sense of your data model (schema) - but let's assume that your Person entity now holds home address and list of favorite restaurants. And let's further assume that you will be creating new entities Address and Restaurant along with the following relationships:
Person has one Address, so there's a to-one relationship from Person to Address called "homeAddress". There's an inverse to-many relationship from Address to Person, because many people could live at the same address.
Person has a to-many relationship (called restaurants) to Restaurants. Restaurant could also has a to-many relationship to Person (though this might be one of those cases where bidirectionality doesn't really make sense).
Anyway, the point is that now - in addition to your PersonToPerson NSEntityMigrationPolicy subclass, you will also have PersonToAddress and PersonToRestaurant. These will be the places that you unpack the old data and use it to instantiate and initialize new Address and Restaurant objects.
Of course, there are lots of other complicating issues. For example, you won't want to be creating a new instance of the same Restaurant for every Person who likes it. You will need to keep track of newly created Restaurants.
You will want to order your mappings strategically - probably with PersonToPerson first.
You might want to look at Marcus Zarra's Core Data sample code and maybe even buy his book.

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