Model settings and attributes

Summary

In this lesson, Kelvin explains how to define attributes for the Article model in Sails. He describes models as representations of database tables (for SQL) or collections (for NoSQL). Each model consists of attributes, which function as table columns or document fields.

For the Article model, he defines two attributes:

• title: A required string field.

• body: A required string field.

Sails uses Waterline as its ORM, and the required: true property ensures that an article must have both a title and a body before being created. With this setup, the model is now ready to store article data, which will be covered in the next lesson.

Transcript

Alright, so now that we've generated our article model, we need to specify the fields. The way we do that is, you see this attributes object in here, you specify the attributes. What are the fields that your model is going to have?

Think of a model as a representation of what a table (if you are using an SQL database) or a collection (in a NoSQL database) would be. This table or collection is going to have columns or fields where you can insert data. So if you have an SQL table, you have different columns.

These attributes are the names of these columns. For our Article model, we want just two attributes:

• The title of the article

• The body (or text) of the article

The way we do this is by naming the field and specifying its type. So we tell Sails that we’re using Waterline, which is the ORM of Sails. We define:

title: {
  type: 'string',
  required: true
}

This means that before creating a new article entry, a title must be provided.

Next, we create the body of our article:

body: {
  type: 'string',
  required: true
}

We also make it required because we don’t want an article without content.

That’s it! Now we have a fully functional Article model that we can start adding data to. In the next lesson, we'll explore how to insert data into this model.