Episode #371

Pivot Tables for Many to Many Relationships

Series: Server-side Swift with Vapor

14 minutes
Published on January 10, 2019

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When you have a many-to-many relationship you typically rely on a join table, or what Vapor calls a Pivot table to relate the records together. In this episode we will create a relationship to allow an issue to have many tags, and also allow a tag to apply to many issues. We'll see how we can use Vapor's ModifiablePivot and Sibling types to make working with these relationships easier.

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New Tag Model

Here we have a new model called Tag. An Issue can have many Tags, and Tags can belong to many Issues. This means we have a many-to-many relationship.

final class Tag : UUIDModel, TimestampModel {
  // ...
}

Designing the Join Model

In order for us to have many on both sides of the relationship, we need a model that refers to the linking of these records. Sometimes these are called join tables, but Vapor calls them Pivot tables.

final class IssueTag : Pivot, UUIDModel {
    static var name: String = "issue_tag"
    typealias Left = Issue
    typealias Right = Tag

    static var leftIdKey: WritableKeyPath = \.issueId
    static var rightIdKey: WritableKeyPath = \.tagId

    var id: UUID?
    var issueId: UUID
    var tagId: UUID
}

Then we can create a migration to create this table.

extension IssueTag : Migration {
    static func prepare(on conn: PostgreSQLConnection) -> Future<Void> {
        return PostgreSQLDatabase.create(self, on: conn) { builder in
            builder.uuidPrimaryKey()
            builder.field(for: \.issueId)
            builder.field(for: \.tagId)
            builder.reference(from: \.issueId, to: \Issue.id, onUpdate: nil, onDelete: .cascade)
            builder.reference(from: \.tagId, to: \Tag.id, onUpdate: nil, onDelete: .cascade)
        }
    }
}

And don't forget to add this line to the migrations list in configure.swift.

Setting up the Sibling Relationship

Over on Issue.swift, we can add a new Siblings relationship:

var tags: Siblings<Issue, Tag, IssueTag> {
    return siblings()
}

These are specified in from, to, through order (which is how I like to think about it).

We can do the same on the Tag side:

var issues: Siblings<Tag, Issue, IssueTag> {
    return siblings()
}

Creating Sibling Records

Since we don't have any useful information in our Pivot model beyond the two keys, we can use the ModifiablePivot type, which requires an initializer:

final class IssueTag : ModifiablePivot, UUIDModel {
    // ...

    init(_ left: Issue, _ right: Tag) throws {
        issueId = try left.requireID()
        tagId = try right.requireID()
    }

    // ...
}

Given an issue and tag instance, you can relate them like this:

return issue.tags.attach(tag, on: req).flatMap { issueTag in
    print("Created issue tag: \(issueTag.id!)")
}

This episode uses Swift 4.2, Vapor 3.0.8, Fluent postgresql-1.0.0, Xcode 10.1.