[baseten-users] question about relationship

[Jianhua Meng]

Hi List,

I thought I should ask the list to confirm if we are doing it the  
correct way with regards to specifying relationships among entities  
for a baseten based app. Something is bugging me. It appears that we  
doing something extra that may be avoided.

For the purpose of discussion, let's assume there exists an optional  
to-one relationship between Person and Employer. When the underlying  
model is loaded into a database via BaseTenAssistant, currently we  
need to take an extra step to prepare the database in order for the  
loaded schema to be usable, i.e. manually call ALTER TABLE "Person"  
ALTER COLUMN "employer_id" DROP NOT NULL; in our model, there are a  
lot of relationships like this. We ended up having to maintain a list  
of such relationships and then run a script to drop all the not null  
constraints on all such relationships.

Without this step, we would not be able to create any Person instances  
because doing so violates the default 'not null' constraint.

It appears that BaseTenAssistant by default creates all the  
relationships with not null constraint applied. Is this behavior by  
design? Is there a way we can influence the BaseTenAssistant behavior  
such that not null constraint is not applied by default?

Thanks for any tips.

Regards,
Jianhua Meng






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