ORM basics

Introduction

Rwf comes with its own ORM (object-relational mapping). The Rwf ORM is very flexible, supporting anything from basic fetch by primary key queries, to multi-table joins and complex custom queries.

What's an ORM?

The ORM is the M in MVC design: the model. It allows to easily retrieve data stored in your database tables and display it in the application, without having to write complex SQL queries by hand.

It works by attaching itself to Rust structs and mapping data from table columns to struct fields (and vice versa), converting them from database types to Rust data types automatically in the process.

Getting started

Using the ORM is simple and only requires defining a struct for each model (or database table). For example, most web apps will have a User model, which stores its data in a "users" table:

Column	Database data type	Rust data type
id	BIGINT	i64
email	VARCHAR	String
created_at	TIMESTAMPTZ	time::OffsetDateTime

Defining the Rust struct for the model can be done as follows:

use rwf::prelude::*;

#[derive(Clone, macros::Model)]
struct User {
    id: Option<i64>,
    email: String,
    created_at: OffsetDateTime,
}

The same table in the database can be created with this query¹:

CREATE TABLE users (
  id BIGSERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  email VARCHAR NOT NULL,
  created_at TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT NOW()
);

Note

The id column is using an optional Rust i64 integer. This is because the struct will be used for both inserting and selecting data from the table. When inserting, the id column should be None and will be automatically assigned by the database. This ensures that all rows in your tables have a unique primary key.

Naming conventions

The struct fields have the same name as the database columns, and the data types match their respective Rust types. The table name in the database corresponds to the name of the struct, lowercase and pluralized. For example, User model will refer to the "users" table in the database.

A row in a database table which contains model data is called a record. The macros::Model macro automatically implements the database to Rust and vice versa types conversion and maps the column values to the struct fields.

Query data

With the model defined in Rust, writing SQL queries is automatically implemented by the ORM. For example, to fetch a record by primary key, you can do the following:

let user = User::find(15)
    .fetch(&mut conn)
    .await?;

The find method is implemented by the Model trait for the User struct automatically. It accepts a Rust integer and produces the following query:

SELECT * FROM "users" WHERE id = $1

The fetch method assembles the query, sends it to the database, and returns one row. The row is converted to an instance of the User struct:

println!("user email: {}", user.email);

Fetch multiple rows

Querying multiple rows can be done by using fetch_all instead of fetch, for example:

let users = User::all()
    .order("id")
    .limit(25)
    .fetch_all(&mut conn)
    .await?;

This will fetch 25 user records from the "users" table, ordering them by the primary key. The result will be a Vec<User>, in the order returned by the database:

for user in &users {
    println!("{}: {}", user.id, user.email);
}

The ORM can be used to write easy and complex queries alike, without having to learn SQL. Rwf currently supports PostgreSQL, but other databases like SQLite and MySQL are on the roadmap.

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1. See migrations to learn how to create tables in your database reliably. ↩