Circular Relations

Problem: circular imports

When two of your ActiveClasses are meant to reciprocally relate to each other, you may encounter a problem of circular imports.

For example, consider the below two classes defined in separate folders. For the purposes of simplicity, we are assuming:

People own at most one pet; and
Pets have at most one owner (who is a person).

src/models/person.js
src/models/animal.js

import { ActiveClass, Schema, relations } from 'fireactive'
import Animal from './animal'

const personSchema = {
  name: Schema.string,
  age: Schema.number,
  petId: Schema.string({ optional: true }) // not all people have pets
}

class Person extends ActiveClass(personSchema) {
  pet = relations.findById(Animal, 'petId')
}

export default Person

Because person.js imports from animal.js, which imports from person.js... we can get stuck in some messy circular imports.

One fix: `relations.store`

You can reorganise your code to get around this, but there is an alternative solution provided by Fireactive.

To make a class available as a relation (without needing to be imported), pass it as an argument to relations.store, and then you can set up a relation using the string name of that class:

src/models/person.js
src/models/animal.js
Demo

import { ActiveClass, Schema, relations } from 'fireactive'

const personSchema = {
  name: Schema.string,
  age: Schema.number,
  petId: Schema.string({ optional: true })
}

class Person extends ActiveClass(personSchema) {
  // pass the string 'Animal' instead of the class
  pet = relations.findById('Animal', 'petId')
}

// store the Person class so other classes can relate to it
relations.store(Person)

export default Person

Problem: circular imports#

One fix: relations.store#

Problem: circular imports

One fix: `relations.store`