Creating a Waterline model

Summary

In this lesson, we explore how to create Waterline models in Sails. While you can manually define models by creating a new JavaScript file and specifying attributes within an exported object, a more efficient approach is to use the Sails CLI tool. Running sails generate model <modelName> from the command line will generate a model file with a basic structure. By convention, model names in Waterline and Sails must be uppercase, and Sails automatically converts lowercase input to uppercase. Once generated, you can edit the model file to define attributes and other settings.

Transcript

Okay, so let's look at creating Waterline models because you need to create a model before you can define the attributes and configure other model settings. Even though you could manually define models by creating a new file—for instance, naming it Product.js—and exporting an object with attributes, this approach, while functional, is not the cleanest way.

Since Waterline models are plain JavaScript objects, defining them by hand works, but there is a more efficient method: using the Sails CLI tool. To generate a model, you can run the following command from the command line:

sails generate model product

Although the input is lowercase, the convention in Waterline and Sails requires model names to be uppercase. Sails automatically converts the model name to uppercase when creating the model file. Upon execution, you will see an informational message indicating that a new model has been created.

If you navigate to the generated file in your code editor, you will see the basic scaffold of a Waterline model. From there, you can start defining attributes and configuring additional model settings as needed.