Building Models

Why is this important?

This workshop is important because:

Most applications include more than one model. Most of these models are related in some way, for instance, artists play multiple songs. Sequelize provides helpful methods for working with related models, just like finding and querying a single table.

What are the objectives?

After this workshop, developers will be able to:

Create Sequelize models with has many and belongs to relationships
Create Sequelize models with has one relationships

Where should we be now?

Before this workshop, developers should already be able to:

Create an Express app
Create a model with Sequelize
Get data from a SQL database using PostgreSQL

Relationships

It's time to start adding some relationships to the existing Tunr database. We're going to include information from the various models on different pages. We'll end up adding song information to artists and help managers gain some credibility by listing their clients. Finally we'll add an optional revenue source by enabling managers to create an ad to help attract new clients.

Now that our Tunr app has artists, managers, and songs, we need to connect them. Enter our old friend, the ERD:

In this lab, we'll be implementing some of the ERD in our Tunr app.

Sprint 0 Setup the application

You'll notice the starter-code for this application is basically the finished version of the last lab.

What are the steps to set up a new application from Github?

Fork/clone the repo, npm install, bower install, node db/dbSetup.js, nodemon server.js.

This repo uses a different database than our Tunr database from last lab so you'll need to create it in psql.

It's also a good idea to do a review the code and see what dependencies are included. What might be some useful dependencies that are included?

express, sequelize, pg, pg-hstore, body-parser

Sprint 1 Songs and Artists

Our first goal is to add a list of songs to the artist detail page and add the artist name to the list of songs. To do this, we'll create a has many relationship between the Artist and Song models.

In the code, we'll need to:

Update the models to list the relationship
Add songs to an artist in our seed file
Update our view accordingly

Update our models: To update our models we need to add only two lines of code. Remember our belongs to and has many keywords from our SQL Relationships lesson? We need to add those to our models\index.js file:

...
Song.belongsTo(Artist);
Artist.hasMany(Song);
...

Adding songs to an artist

First, we need to define a few songs that we will add to our artist, and put them in our seed.js file:

var lucySongs = [
	{
		title: "O sole mio",
		duration: "3:21",
		date_of_release: "1990",
		album_title: "Three Tenors in Concert"
	},
	{
		title: "Nessun dorma",
		duration: "3:21",
		date_of_release: "1990",
		album_title: "Three Tenors in Concert"
	}
];

Next, we need to add them to an Artist. If we're using the seed file, the first artist is Luciano Pavoritti.

How do we add all these songs to Luciano? Well, remember our friend foreign key from our SQL Relationships lesson? We need to put Luciano's artist id into a column in each song. That will look like this:

.then(function(artist) {
  	lucySongs.forEach(function(song) {
  		song.artistId = artist.id;
  	});
  	DB.Song.bulkCreate(lucySongs);
  });

Now, we should be able to access a song's artist with the .artist method. And the .songs method will give us the songs associated with an artist.

Update our Views:

First, we must update what we're getting back from the Database to include songs with our artist.

Let's add the following line to the top of our artists (server-side) controller:

var Song = db.models.Song;

Then we need to include any Song that matches our artist ID in our show route:

  Artist.findById(req.params.id, {
    //Return all songs that have a matching artistId
    include: Song
  })

Finally, we need to add an unordered list to templates/artists/show.html with all our songs:

<ul>
  <li ng-repeat="song in artistController.oneArtist.songs">{{song.title}}</li>
</ul>

Make sure your server is updated and let's review our work!

Sprint 2 Artists and Managers

Just like artists need to highlight the hit songs they are associated with, managers need to highlight the hit artists they are associated with.

First, we need to create a has many relationship between managers and artists. Try to do this without looking at the Sprint above first, then correct as needed. Don't forget to run dbSetup.js, or you won't be able to finish the next steps.

Now we have a has_many relationship between Manager and Artist, so we need to seed our DB a little differently. Add Pavarotti to Ricky Bobby's roster. Try to do this without looking at the Sprint above first, then correct as needed.

Hint: Maybe the manager should be created first now, then we can pass its id into the artist creation function in a .then clause. Once this is done, do we even need to call artistCreate() at the bottom of seed.js?

Now, let's add an unordered list of the manager's songs to templates/managers/show.html. Again, try to do this without looking at the Sprint above, then correct as needed.

Sprint 3 Manager Ads

Last but not least, let's start adding some revenue to Tunr. We're enabling managers to create ads to help drum up business.

We'll do the following steps to add ads to our managers.

Create a new model Ad that includes the fields headline and url (both Strings).
Add a Manager has_one Ad relationship.
Add an Ad belongs_to Manager relationship.
Create a new Ad in seed.js and associate the Ricky Bobby manager to the ad.
On the manager index page, for each manager add the ad headline as a link to the ad url.

Closing Thoughts

Relationships are one of the most powerful ways we have of manipulating data. They let us use the JS methods and object that we are much more comfortable with rather than SQL which can be messy and lead to bugs.

Resources

* Beware, this tutorial has some typos, misplaced files, and poorly explained concepts. I give it a 7/10. If you want to get used to reading tutorials, this is a pretty good example of what I'd call "good enough".

Licensing

All content is licensed under a CCBYNCSA 4.0 license. All software code is licensed under GNU GPLv3. For commercial use or alternative licensing, please contact legal@ga.co.

den-wdi-2 / tunr-relationships