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I have a challenge from a customer. They'd like me to be able to support the creation, editing and deletion of custom fields against a Model within my application. This is so they can record any values that they see fit against a model and report against them.

I've tried a few methods of completing this however neither allowed for easy integration into our existing reporting engine and I'd quite like to keep that as untouched as possible.

I've scoured the web for similar answers to this question and most were from 2015 - 2018 and most were asking for dynamic models to be supported as well and frequently the answer was "No not yet but we will support this in future".

To support dynamic models I have seen solutions that reload waterline via sails.hooks.orm.reload() or even pro-grammatically restarting the sails app altogether and initialising again with the new model present. This could cause a few seconds of downtime for your application as the server restarted (for us it is about 30 as we have a huge app with nearly 50 models and 350 routes). We can't really go with this process as that down time is too much of an overhead and our clients would be a bit miffed.

Is potentially supporting just the dynamic handling of attributes possible without all the bootstrapping that takes place on sails lift or is it just not feasible? My initial feeling from all my reading is essentially no - as the processes in place during startup hook up and sync waterline/your db/your files.

Any discussion or examples of similar work welcomed.

MattGarnett
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  • I think the way to do this is use json attributes in your models. A modifiable model would need an attribute like `customerAttributes` or something, and its keys/values could be set by customer input. The downside is, I bet it doesn't work with your current reporting system. The upside is, no reload required. Which keys to expect in `customerAttributes` could be saved elsewhere, possibly in it's own collection (along with metadata like field type, etc), and then each model data would be stored in `customerAttributes`. – arbuthnott Mar 04 '20 at 14:13
  • I imagine, this is somewhat similar example? There is a House model. It has color, height, size. But the customer want to add any new parameters anytime and query by these in any other project parts. So you plan to add as many new model columns as client asks. Even 100 if needed? Add delete anytime the client asks. Well, what if you have just a HouseSetting model, with Key and Value? Field = "color", value = "red", "house_id" = 1. So, there would be a relation. House would be a new model with just ID and some basic known info. And it would have many related Settings. – mansim Mar 09 '20 at 09:11

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