Relationships

Tensei supports all the major relationships needed for any web application, and ships with fields to make implementing these relationships fast and easy.

Has One Field
Has Many Field
Belongs To Field
Belongs To Many Field

Has One Field

This field provides a way for one resource to be linked to another resource via a one-to-one relationship. For example, a customer in your application might have one address. This means you'll have a Customer resource and an Address resource, and link them with this relationship like this:

import { tensei, resource, hasOne, integer, text } from '@tensei/core'

export default tensei()
    .resources([
        resource('Customer')
            .fields([
                text('Email'),
                hasOne('Address')
            ]),
        resource('Address')
            .fields([
                integer('Zip Code'),
                text('Street Name')
            ])
    ])

Has Many Field

This field provides a way for one resource to be linked to another via a one-to-many relationship. For example, in a library application, an author may have many books. This means you'll have an Author resource and a Book resource, and link them with this relationship like this:

import { tensei, resource, hasMany, integer, text, belongsTo } from '@tensei/core'

export default tensei()
    .resources([
        resource('Author')
            .fields([
                text('Full Name'),
                hasMany('Book')
            ]),
        resource('Book')
            .fields([
                text('Title'),
                text('ISBN').unique(),
                belongsTo('Author')
            ])
    ])

Do not forget to define the reverse belongsTo() relationship on the related resource, in this case the Book resource.

Belongs To Field

This field provides a way for one resource to be linked to another via a many-to-one relationship. For example, in a library application, a book may belong to one author. This means you'll have a Book resource and an Author resource, and link them with this relationship like this:

import { tensei, resource, hasMany, integer, text, belongsTo } from '@tensei/core'

export default tensei()
    .resources([
        resource('Book')
            .fields([
                text('Title'),
                text('ISBN').unique(),
                belongsTo('Author')
            ]),
        resource('Author')
            .fields([
                text('Full Name'),
                hasMany('Book')
            ]),
    ])

Do not forget to define the reverse hasMany() relationship on the related resource, in this case the Author resource.

Belongs To Many Field

This field provides a way for one resource to be linked to another via a many-to-many relationship. For example, in a blogging application, a tag may belong to many posts. This means you'll have a Tag resource and a Post resource, and link them with this relationship like this:

import { tensei, resource, hasMany, integer, text, textarea, belongsToMany } from '@tensei/core'

export default tensei()
    .resources([
        resource('Tag')
            .fields([
                text('Name'),
                text('Slug').unique(),
                belongsToMany('Post')
            ]),
        resource('Post')
            .fields([
                text('Title'),
                textarea('Content'),
                belongsToMany('Tag')
            ]),
    ])

Do not forget to define the reverse belongsToMany() relationship on the related resource.

Customizing relationship fields

If you would like to customize how relationships are displayed on the CMS or exposed to the API, you can use the methods below:

Searchable relations

By default, the belongsTo() relationship displays the related resource in a basic dropdown select.

Take our library application as an example. An author has many books, and a book belongs to one author. On the CMS, when creating a book, we'll see a select dropdown showing all available authors in the application. If we have 10,000 authors, this dropdown won't cut it. We need a better way to handle this.

You can call the .searchable() methon on the relationship field, and this will automatically change the component displayed on the CMS to a searchable combobox.