Sails creating data into many to many relationship

Question

I currently have two collections, which are Schools and Contacts. The Schools collection has already been populated with thousand of data while Contacts is a new collection which is still empty.

Now there's a schema change for both of them. Here's the schema detail:

// ----------- Schools.js
module.exports = {
  attributes: {
    user: {
      model: 'users'
      // Của User đã tạo
    },

    essential: {
      type: 'string'
      // Lưu toàn bộ thông tin của essential
    },

    contacts: {
      collection: 'contacts',
      via: 'schools'
    },

    pipeline: {
        type: 'string',
        defaultTo: ""
    },

    status: {
      type: 'integer',
      defaultsTo: 1
      // 0: un-active, 1: active
    }
  }
};

// ----------- Contacts.js

module.exports = {
    attributes: {
        title: {
            type: 'string'
        },

        firstName: {
            type: 'string'
        },

        lastName: {
            type: 'string'
        },

        email: {
            type: 'string'
        },

        position: {
            type: 'string'
        },

        landlinePhone: {
            type: 'string'
        },

        mobilePhone: {
            type: 'string'
        },

        externalCompany: {
            type: 'string'
        },

        schools : {
            collection: 'schools',
            via: 'contacts',
            dominant: true
        },

        user: {
            model: 'users'
        },

        activities: {
            collection: 'activities',
            via: 'contact'
        },

        status: {
            type: 'integer',
            defaultsTo: 1
            // 0: remove, 1: active, 2: unactive
        }
    }
};

And here's my code when creating a new contact:

Contacts.create(contactData).exec(function (e1, newContact) {
    if (e1) {
      console.log("e1 ::: ", e1);
    };

    // newContact is filled with contact new data..
    console.log("Contact data has been created", newContact, schoolId);

    // Adding schools to newContact (schoolId has a value here);
    newContact.schools.add(schoolId);

    // Save
    newContact.save(function (err) { console.log('err', err) });
});

However, when I check on my database, contacts has been created but without schools attributes. And the related schools also still has no contacts attribute.

I've tried the following;

newContact.schools.add([schoolId]);
// or --
newContact.schools.add(schoolObj);
// or --
newContact.schools.add([schoolObj]);

I've tried to switch the dominant attribute between those two collections and doing the execution reversed like,

school.contacts.add(newContact);

I've also tried these solution and no lucks;

• http://sailsjs.com/documentation/concepts/models-and-orm/associations/many-to-many
• https://github.com/balderdashy/waterline-docs/issues/20
• Sails.js How to insert data into a join table (Many to Many)

Am I missing something here? Any suggestion is appreciated..

Answer 1

Your code is fine, it attaches schools to contacts.

In sails console, run this:

Contacts.find(contactId).populateAll().exec(console.log);

If it prints contact along with schools array populated, data is persisted in DB. It might be in a separate collection rather than being inside Contacts in MongoDB.

PS: pipeline definition has a typo in defaultTo (should be defaultsTo)