update nested object

[venelin-mihaylov]

First, thank you very much for your work on Hasura, its a great product.
There is a feature that I would be very happy to have, wanted to know what are your thoughts on it.
Currently there Is a nested insert feature. However having only an insert without update is not very useful.

Do you have plans to implement update for nested objects?
IMO, the logic would have to be:
I. for lists (1:N)

• for every relation record:
  1. If it is present in input, not present in the db, then insert the record and link it to owning record
  2. If it is present in db, not present in input, the delete it
  3. If it is present in db and is present in input, then update its columns

II. For objects (belongsTo)

• if relation record has an ID, link it to master and update its values
• if relation record has no ID, then create it
• if relation record is not present in input, but is present in db, then unlink it (an option to delete it would be nice)

Thank you

[alaarihan]

@venelin-mihaylov I have some notes about your suggestion:

I. for lists (1:N)

• for every relation record:

  1. If it is present in input, not present in the db, then insert the record and link it to owning record
  2. If it is present in db, not present in input, the delete it

in your delete case we will always have to include all of the related object to avoid deleting them! what if we have a million items, we need to include all of them to the nested update mutation to avoid losing them? I think we need another way for delete nested items

3. If it is present in db and is present in input, then update its columns

And we need a way to link existing items to the master without updating their data

II. For objects (belongsTo)

• if relation record has an ID, link it to master and update its values
• if relation record has no ID, then create it
• if relation record is not present in input, but is present in db, then unlink it (an option to delete it would be nice)

Here is the same note too we can't delete all items when we don't include them in the nested mutation, we need to think in a different way.

[anasvn]

Waiting for this feature to reduce multiple hasura calls.

[nolandg]

@alaarihan The way Prisma solves this is with a connect and a disconnect field so you don't need to include a million ids in your mutation request. eg:

updatePost(_set: {
  tags: {
    connect: [
      {id: 1},
      {id: 2},
    ],
    disconnect: [
      {id: 3},
      {id: 4}
    ],
    insert: [
      {name: "cats"}
    ],
  }
})

Anything not mentioned in these fields is not touched. User-land code must decide what is present in db already that needs removing etc. This makes more sense because since you're probably not adding/removing millions of things at once and you have a list of which ones you're changing. This works really well for me with Prisma. I'm trying to see how to convert my framework over to Hasura...will require some extra queries me thinks.

[alaarihan]

Yes @nolandg , I'm familiar with Prisma system but if we made this change in Hasura that will cause a big breaking change to the system so I was thinking in a different way to make it without breaking changes if that possible.

[luke-j]

Curious if this is on the roadmap? This seems like a really important feature to have, in my opinion.

[bkstorm]

yeah, it's inconvenient when hasura doesn't support this feature.
For example: a product can have a thumbnail (optional and is stored in image table), id of the thumbnail is stored in the field thumbnail_id in product table.
First, I create a product without the thumbnail. It's ok, very easy.
Then I want to add a thumbnail to the product.
I have to insert a new row into image table, get id back then update product table with that id.
And all the operation should be in the same transaction.
What should I do, using event trigger or create a new resolvers on my own graphql server.

[RodolfoSilva]

Any update about this issue?