Transactions & relations

[gothy]

First of all, let me thank you for this cool library :) Now, I'm really considering using Redis Enterprise as a primary DB in the future projects!

So, my question arises from this section in the readme https://github.com/redis/redis-om-node#-embedding-your-own-logic-into-entities We can fetch "relations" in our entities, but I'm more interested in updating those relations as a part of a transaction. I can see that currently, saving an entity requires you to call repository.save(entity), but what about related entries? What if I need to update an entity, some sub-entity and commit or discard all of the changes?

It would be cool to have something like

getCurrentClient().startTransaction(() => {
  repository1.save(entity);
  repository2.save(subentity);
}).then(...).catch(...)

[HeyItsBATMAN]

This could be achieved by exposing/using .multi() from the @node-redis Client used in RedisShim. Then, instead of saving the data using the .save() method from a Repository one could prepare the data like it is prepared in the .save(), skip the saving, and instead appending it to the exposed .multi().

I threw together a proof of concept

Preparing the data for transaction in the repository could look like:

prepareForTransaction(entity: Entity) {
  const key = this.makeKey(entity.entityId);
  const {dataStructure} = this.schema;

  const data = dataStructure === 'JSON'
    ? this.jsonConverter.toJsonData(entity.entityData)
    : this.hashConverter.toHashData(entity.entityData);

  return {key, data, dataStructure};
}

This data could then be used in some kind of Transaction class like:

export default class Transaction {
  private multi;

  constructor(client: Client) {
    this.multi = client.multi();
  }

  add(repository: Repository<Entity>, entity: Entity) {
    const { key, data, dataStructure } = repository.prepareForTransaction(entity);
    dataStructure === 'JSON' ? this.multi.jsonset(key, data) : this.multi.hSet(key, data);
    return this;
  }

  exec() {
    return this.multi.exec();
  }
}

And finally, a transaction could be created and executed with as many steps as needed:

new Transaction(client)
  .add(fooRepo, fooEntity)
  .add(barRepo, barEntity)
  .exec();

It's probably better to execute this inside of an isolated Client though, like RedisShim is doing for .hsetall().

[guyroyse]

Regarding transactions, I think this is an interesting idea. I'll consider it in the future.

Regarding nesting objects and relationships, this has been asked a couple of different times by a couple of different people with different flavors. It's something that's on the roadmap but not in the backlog. It'll happen. Not sure exactly what it will look like yet.