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Announcing Edge-field Support in v0.7.0

· 阅读时间 5 分钟

Over the past few months, there has been much discussion in the Ent project issues about adding support for the retrieval of the foreign key field when retrieving entities with One-to-One or One-to-Many edges. We are happy to announce that as of v0.7.0 ent supports this feature.

Before Edge-field Support

Prior to merging this branch, a user that wanted to retrieve the foreign-key field for an entity needed to use eager-loading. Suppose our schema looked like this:

// ent/schema/user.go:

// User holds the schema definition for the User entity.
type User struct {
ent.Schema
}

// Fields of the User.
func (User) Fields() []ent.Field {
return []ent.Field{
field.String("name").
Unique().
NotEmpty(),
}
}

// Edges of the User.
func (User) Edges() []ent.Edge {
return []ent.Edge{
edge.From("pets", Pet.Type).
Ref("owner"),
}
}

// ent/schema/pet.go

// Pet holds the schema definition for the Pet entity.
type Pet struct {
ent.Schema
}

// Fields of the Pet.
func (Pet) Fields() []ent.Field {
return []ent.Field{
field.String("name").
NotEmpty(),
}
}

// Edges of the Pet.
func (Pet) Edges() []ent.Edge {
return []ent.Edge{
edge.To("owner", User.Type).
Unique().
Required(),
}
}

The schema describes two related entities: User and Pet, with a One-to-Many edge between them: a user can own many pets and a pet can have one owner.

When retrieving pets from the data storage, it is common for developers to want to access the foreign-key field on the pet. However, because this field is created implicitly from the owner edge it was automatically accessible when retrieving an entity. To retrieve this from the storage a developer needed to do something like:

func Test(t *testing.T) {
ctx := context.Background()
c := enttest.Open(t, dialect.SQLite, "file:ent?mode=memory&cache=shared&_fk=1")
defer c.Close()

// Create the User
u := c.User.Create().
SetUserName("rotem").
SaveX(ctx)

// Create the Pet
p := c.Pet.
Create().
SetOwner(u). // Associate with the user
SetName("donut").
SaveX(ctx)

petWithOwnerId := c.Pet.Query().
Where(pet.ID(p.ID)).
WithOwner(func(query *ent.UserQuery) {
query.Select(user.FieldID)
}).
OnlyX(ctx)
fmt.Println(petWithOwnerId.Edges.Owner.ID)
// Output: 1
}

Aside from being very verbose, retrieving the pet with the owner this way was inefficient in-terms of database queries. If we execute the query with the .Debug() we can see the DB queries ent generates to satisfy this call:

SELECT DISTINCT `pets`.`id`, `pets`.`name`, `pets`.`pet_owner` FROM `pets` WHERE `pets`.`id` = ? LIMIT 2 
SELECT DISTINCT `users`.`id` FROM `users` WHERE `users`.`id` IN (?)

In this example, Ent first retrieves the Pet with an ID of 1, then redundantly fetches the id field from the users table for users with an ID of 1.

With Edge-field Support

Edge-field support greatly simplifies and improves the efficiency of this flow. With this feature, developers can define the foreign key field as part of the schemas Fields(), and by using the .Field(..) modifier on the edge definition instruct Ent to expose and map the foreign column to this field. So, in our example schema, we would modify it to be:

// user.go stays the same

// pet.go
// Fields of the Pet.
func (Pet) Fields() []ent.Field {
return []ent.Field{
field.String("name").
NotEmpty(),
field.Int("owner_id"), // <-- explicitly add the field we want to contain the FK
}
}

// Edges of the Pet.
func (Pet) Edges() []ent.Edge {
return []ent.Edge{
edge.To("owner", User.Type).
Field("owner_id"). // <-- tell ent which field holds the reference to the owner
Unique().
Required(),
}
}

In order to update our client code we need to re-run code generation:

go generate ./...

We can now modify our query to be much simpler:

func Test(t *testing.T) {
ctx := context.Background()
c := enttest.Open(t, dialect.SQLite, "file:ent?mode=memory&cache=shared&_fk=1")
defer c.Close()

u := c.User.Create().
SetUserName("rotem").
SaveX(ctx)

p := c.Pet.Create().
SetOwner(u).
SetName("donut").
SaveX(ctx)

petWithOwnerId := c.Pet.GetX(ctx, p.ID) // <-- Simply retrieve the Pet

fmt.Println(petWithOwnerId.OwnerID)
// Output: 1
}

Running with the .Debug() modifier we can see that the DB queries make more sense now:

SELECT DISTINCT `pets`.`id`, `pets`.`name`, `pets`.`owner_id` FROM `pets` WHERE `pets`.`id` = ? LIMIT 2

Hooray 🎉!

Migrating Existing Schemas to Edge Fields

If you are already using Ent with an existing schema, you may already have O2M relations whose foreign-key columns already exist in your database. Depending on how you configured your schema, chances are that they may be stored in a column by a different name than the field you are now adding. For instance, you want to create an owner_id field, but Ent auto-created the column foreign-key column as pet_owner.

To check what column name Ent is using for this field you can look in the ./ent/migrate/schema.go file:

PetsColumns = []*schema.Column{
{Name: "id", Type: field.TypeInt, Increment: true},
{Name: "name", Type: field.TypeString},
{Name: "pet_owner", Type: field.TypeInt, Nullable: true}, // <-- this is our FK
}

To allow for a smooth migration, you must explicitly tell Ent to keep using the existing column name. You can do this by using the StorageKey modifier (either on the field or on the edge). For example:

// In schema/pet.go:

// Fields of the Pet.
func (Pet) Fields() []ent.Field {
return []ent.Field{
field.String("name").
NotEmpty(),
field.Int("owner_id").
StorageKey("pet_owner"), // <-- explicitly set the column name
}
}

In the near future we plan to implement Schema Versioning, which will store the history of schema changes alongside the code. Having this information will allow ent to support such migrations in an automatic and predictable way.

Wrapping Up

Edge-field support is readily available and can be installed by go get -u entgo.io/ent@v0.7.0.

Many thanks 🙏 to all the good people who took the time to give feedback and helped design this feature properly: Alex Snast, Ruben de Vries, Marwan Sulaiman, Andy Day, Sebastian Fekete and Joe Harvey.

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