Payload-relationship-enhancer NPM

payload-relationship-enhancer

This is a very early release of a plugin designed to enhance the relationships within payload to do two things:

Provide referential integrity through deletes - i.e. if A references B and then B is deleted, A should no longer reference A
Provide bi-directional relationships - i.e. if A references B, allow B to reference A and keep them in sync.

Motivation: if you have used keystonejs you know why, but more importantly, this stops gymnastics at query time to try and reverse lookup a relationship and instead builds it into the GraphQL / REST schema

A word of warning

This was written by someone who is bad at coding, and until a week ago had never used Mongo or Payload. Performance is probably bad and it might delete all your relationships.

I am almost certain this will not work properly for everyone and in every case, please leave an issue with details about how your relationships were setup!

Payload would appear to be considering bi-directional relationships as a core feature (although it is not on roadmap) in the future, so this should be seen as a stop-gap for applications prior to its official implementation.

Getting started

bun add payload-relationship-enhancer
update your payload config like this:

import RelationshipEnhancerPlugin from "payload-relationship-enhancer";

plugins: [payloadCloud(), RelationshipEnhancerPlugin],

configure it like this:

    {
      type: "relationship",
      relationTo: "c",
      hasMany: true,
      name: "amixedblocks",
      custom: {
        relationshipEnhancer: {
          relationshipIntegrity: true,
          biDirectional: [
            {
              relationTo: "c", // must match one or more of the things in relationTo
              path: "cmixedblocks", // this is the path of the field on c that is ALSO a relationship field AND has a biDirectional config pointing back here
            },
            ...
          ],
        },
      },
    },

Config type is

        {
          relationshipIntegrity?: boolean,
          biDirectional?: [
            {
              relationTo: string;
              path: string;
            },
            ...
          ],
        }

Limitations / TODO

Currently any relationship field nested under an array will be ignored by this plugin, groups and tabs and blocks should be fine.
Only Mongo is supported as a database, it is very possible to add Postgres.
Support for localised relationship fields is not yet there
The changes made by this plugin do NOT trigger lifecycle hooks - i.e. if you have a bi-directional relationship between A and B, and set the value in A to some B document, the plugin will update a B document but no update hook will run - this is because we use the mongoose adapter directly and I am not sure exactly how to manually trigger updates.
This really needs some tests
I don't think the structure of this plugin follows best practice
Should add some plugin init config params for profiling performance
Better docs
The config will let you point two fields on 1 collection to 1 field on another - this breaks stuff. need to sanitise out in config check step
Some janky stuff with 'required' relationship fields that needs to be tested out