Originally published on strongloop.com
Since we made the LoopBack Slack community available, we are happy to see more and more users are joining. Let's see some of the questions and answers that we've highlighted below.
Question: In the Model documentation page, it says "To define a model for use with the juggler bridge, extend your classes from Entity". What's the juggler bridge?
Answer: the Juggler bridge is used to bridge the gap between @loopback/repository and loopback-datasource-juggler. The former is used by LoopBack 4 to help define Models, Repositories, etc. It also allows for cross-datasource relations, etc. as they are enforced at the application level instead of the database.
The latter is the ORM/ODM that builds the queries and interacts with the database. It's from LoopBack 3 and is probably the only major component that didn't get revamped to keep backwards-compatibility.
Hence, the Juggler bridge helps bridge the gaps between these Node.js packages.
Entity is, at it's core, a model that has an ID property. Looking at the source code for Entity, there's quite a bit of boilerplate code added.
Question: Is there a way to change the application port to string ? I am trying to deploy the application under Azure web app where the port is a string.
Answer: Use port: +(process.env.BILLING_PORT || 3000),. The + converts a string to number. For the pipe, you should use path property instead of port. See https://github.com/strongloop/loopback-next/blob/master/packages/http-server/src/tests/integration/http-server.integration.ts#L272.
Question: I have a model with a field which is defined as “number”. Working with Postgres. How should I define it to have the field as a double and not an integer ?
Answer: You can specify the dataType field to define a certain type of that column. For type Double, for example,
@model()
export class Item extends Entity {
@property({
type: 'number',
id: true,
generated: false,
})
id?: number;
@property({
type: 'number',
postgresql: {
dataType: 'double precision',
},
})
price?: number;
....
Then run npm run build and then npm run migrate commands, the table should have columns:
price | | double precision
Besides the data type, LB4 also allows you to describe tables via the model definition and/or property definition. See Data Mapping Properties for information.
Question: Is there client sdk for lb4 for api code generation? I tried with swagger codegen, but the generated code seems doesn't work.
Answer: You should try lb4 openapi --client. It generates strongly-typed LoopBack service proxies over openapi spec using TypeScript. We use it to generate SDKs in TS.
Interested to Join our Slack Workspace?
Simply click this invitation link to join. You can also find more channel details here: https://github.com/strongloop/loopback-next/issues/5048.