The User and Story Models

Now that the database connection is established, you can create your two entities User and Story.

The User entity will be the model used by the framework to identify users and the Story entity will represent the users' posts.

The User Model

Open the user.entity.ts file from the entities directory and add four new properties to your model: email, password, name and avatar.

The avatar column will contain the paths to the profile images.

You will also need to export an additional model DatabaseSession from the @foal/typeorm package. You don't need to worry about it now, it will be used later in the tutorial when you add authentication.

import { BaseEntity, Column, Entity, PrimaryGeneratedColumn } from 'typeorm';

@Entity()
export class User extends BaseEntity {

  @PrimaryGeneratedColumn()
  id: number;

  @Column({ unique: true })
  email: string;

  @Column()
  password: string;

  @Column()
  name: string;

  @Column()
  avatar: string;

}

// This line is required. It will be used to create the SQL session table later in the tutorial.
export { DatabaseSession } from '@foal/typeorm';

The Story Model

Then create your second entity.

npx foal generate entity story

Open the new file and add three new properties: author, title and link.

import { BaseEntity, Column, Entity, ManyToOne, PrimaryGeneratedColumn } from 'typeorm';
import { User } from './user.entity';

@Entity()
export class Story extends BaseEntity {

  @PrimaryGeneratedColumn()
  id: number;

  @ManyToOne(type => User, { nullable: false })
  author: User;

  @Column()
  title: string;

  @Column()
  link: string;

}

By default, TypeORM allows many-to-one relationships to be nullable. The option passed to the decorator specifies that this one cannot be.

Run Migrations

Finally, create the tables in the database. Generate the migrations from the entities and run them.

npm run makemigrations
npm run migrations

Three new tables are added to the database: the user and story tables and a sessions table.

+------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+
|                             user                             |
+------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+
| id         | integer   | PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL |
| email      | varchar   | UNIQUE NOT NULL                     |
| password   | varchar   | NOT NULL                            |
| name       | varchar   | NOT NULL                            |
| avatar     | varchar   | NOT NULL                            |
+------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+

+------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+
|                             story                            |
+------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+
| id         | integer   | PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL |
| authorId   | integer   | NOT NULL                            |
| title      | varchar   | NOT NULL                            |
| link       | varchar   | NOT NULL                            |
+------------+-----------+-------------------------------------+