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Community Q&A Monthly Digest - July 2020

· 3 min read
Diana Lau

Originally published on strongloop.com

Welcome to the July edition of the "Community Q&A Monthly Digest", curating some of the Q&A that we think it might be helpful to you. Let's take a look.


Question: Is there a built-in support in LB4 for database retries if the db responds with 429 for example? Or is it possible to overwrite a single method to implement this for all db operations similiar to how entityToData can be overwriten if data should be added to all create/update operations.

Answer: It's better to intercept execution errors inside the datasource, not at repository level. I created a small example to demonstrate the approach. In a real app, I would extract the code into a mixin that can be applied on any DataSource class. https://gist.github.com/bajtos/2379d7c6df31e477aaa3a3f6ea87886c


Question: Is it possible to connect my API to a webhook, so that when an event is triggered, it notifies my API? What documentation could I read about doing this?

Answer: A webhook is just another HTTP request. Depending on the architecture of the lb4 app, this request can be done in a Service, an Interceptor, or a Controller, using either the built-in Node.js API or third-party HTTP request modules such as Axios. Besides that, no special configuration is needed for web hooks. 


Question: How to implement findOrCreate instead await exists + await create?

Answer: You can extend DefaultCrudRepository with findOrCreate ’s implementation. Then your repositories extend the custom one. Similar to how AccountRepository extends MyDefaultCrudRepository in the tutorial https://loopback.io/doc/en/lb4/Repositories.html#define-repositories.


Question: I started using Loopback 4. How to redirect home screen of LB4 to angular 8 running on some other port?

Answer: It should be possible to replace the .static function in the app class with .redirect: https://loopback.io/doc/en/lb4/apidocs.rest.restapplication.redirect.html.


Question: The compiler throws the error error TS2322: Type 'string' is not assignable to type PredicateComparison<..> when I tried some repository CRUD methods. Is it a bug or anything wrong with my setup?

Answer: It is a type issue. For repository CRUD methods, they may take in Filter or Where type parameters. For those cases, you will need to specify the type of it, for example:

const userCount = await this.userRepository.count({tags: 'admin'} as Where<User>);
const vipUser = await this.userRepository.find({where:{tags: 'vip'}} as Filter<User>);

Question: We have a project which includes multi-tenancy based multi-database pattern (We have Common DB which stores Client Informations (Users, DB configs etc), and each clients has own database). How can I perform switching datasource dynamically with the multi-tenancy based project?

Answer: You can check out the multi-tenancy example and the GH issue that discusses about multi-tenancy and dynamic schema selection. You can create datasources at runtime. Meanwhile, if the number of dbs is limited, you can define them upfront and reuse them, see Creating a datasource at runtime. Then the tenant strategy can inject a repository talking to your common DB to load configs per logged in user.


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