Creating, Updating, and Deleting Records with Fluent

Episode #358 | 19 minutes | published on October 4, 2018 | Uses Xcode-10.0, FluentSQLite-3.0.0, swift-4.2, Vapor-3.0.8

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Now that we have Fluent set up, let’s see how we can use it to add, update, and delete records to the database. We’ll get a taste for how futures work in Vapor, and we will also see some of the builtin features that Vapor has to make loading records from your routes really simple.

This episode is part of a series: Server-side Swift with Vapor.

1. Getting Started with Vapor 12 min

2. Vapor Routing 14 min

3. Leaf Templates 13 min

4. Nesting Templates and Partials 8 min

5. Vapor Demo: Tokenizr 21 min

6. Setting up a Database with Fluent 19 min

7. Creating, Updating, and Deleting Records with Fluent 19 min

8. Vapor Futures 20 min

9. Setting up Vapor with Postgresql 17 min

10. UUID Primary Keys 13 min

11. Timestamp Fields 4 min

12. Refactoring to Protocols 12 min

13. Parent Child Relationships and Foreign Keys 14 min

14. Pivot Tables for Many to Many Relationships 14 min

15. Vapor Controllers 15 min

16. Decoding Request Parameters 9 min

Episode Links

Fluent - Getting Started
Fluent Models - Documentation
httpstatus.es - a handy reference to look up HTTP status codes

Create a route to save a record

In the routes file:

router.get("_demo") { req -> Future<String> in 
    let post = Post(title: "Hello Fluent", body: "This is how you set up a database using Vapor Fluent", author: "Ben")
    post.publishedAt = Date()

    return post.save(on: req).map { post in 
        return "Created post with ID: \(post.id!)"
    }
}

Deleting a record

We'll first see the hard way of doing it (because that's a great way to learn the magic behind Vapor) and then we'll look at an easier way.

router.delete("posts", Int.parameter) { req -> Future<String> in 

    let postId = try req.parameters.next(Int.self)
    return Post.find(postId, on: req).flatMap { maybePost in

        guard let post = maybePost else {
            throw Abort(.notFound)
        }

        return post.delete(on: req).map {
            return "deleted post: \(post.id!)"
        }
    }   
}

As it turns out, fetching a record and performing an action on it is a really common operation, so Fluent has a great feature for making this easier.

Automatically fetching records as route parameters

Let's open up our Post.swift file and add this at the bottom:

extension Post : Parameter {}

We can then alter the route above like this:

router.delete("posts", Post.parameter) { req -> Future<String> in
    guard let futurePost = try? req.parameters.next(Post.self) else {
        throw Abort(.badRequest)
    }

    return futurePost.flatMap { post in
        return post.delete(on: req).map {
            return "deleted post: \(post.id!)"
        }
    }
}

This is a huge time saver and shows off the power of Vapor's integration with Fluent.

Updating Records

Let's finish up our example by creating a route that will publish a post. In this example I want to return the JSON of the post we are modifying.

Let's go back to Post.swift and add this at the bottom:

extension Post : Content {}

This tells Vapor that our model can be serialized. This uses Codable to return JSON representations of our models.

Now we can tell our route to simply return a Post (in the future).

// PUT /posts/1/publish
router.put("posts", Post.parameter, "publish") { req -> Future<Post> in

    try req.parameters.next(Post.self).flatMap { post in
        post.publishedAt = Date()
        return post.save(on: req)
    }
}

As you can see, once you get used to the Future syntax, manipulating records is fairly straightforward.

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