Using a Store

Stores in Modelence are MongoDB collections with built-in TypeScript support, schema and helper methods. They help you to:

• Define type-safe schemas for your data
• Handle CRUD operations with MongoDB
• Add custom methods to your documents
• Configure indexes for better performance

Create a Store

You can define a store anywhere in your project, as long as it is imported and passed into a Module (we will cover Modules in the next tutorial). While you can define everything in a single file, the recommended approach in Modelence is to group code by modules / domains into separate directories. For our Todo app, we'll just put everything into a single todo directory on the server side. Create an src/server/todo directory and add a db.ts file to it which we'll use to define our store for todo items:

src/server/todo/db.ts

import { Store, schema } from 'modelence';

export const dbTodos = new Store('todos', {
  // Define the schema for your documents. Modelence schema is based on and closely resembles Zod types.
  schema: {
    title: schema.string(),
    isCompleted: schema.boolean(), 
    dueDate: schema.date().optional(),
    userId: schema.userId(), // Built-in Modelence type for user references
    createdAt: schema.date(),
  },

  // Configure MongoDB indexes
  indexes: [
    { key: { userId: 1 } },
    { key: { dueDate: 1 } },
  ],

  // Add custom methods to documents
  methods: {
    isOverdue() {
      return this.dueDate < new Date();
    }
  }
});

Using the Store

Once defined, you can use your Store object to perform any operations on your collection. For example:

const { insertedId } = await dbTodos.insertOne({
  title: 'Buy groceries', 
  isCompleted: false, 
  dueDate: new Date('2023-01-31'),
  userId: '123',
  createdAt: new Date()
});

const todo = await dbTodos.findById(insertedId);

console.log(todo.isOverdue());

Working with Documents

Stores provide a comprehensive set of methods for working with MongoDB documents, including finding, inserting, updating, and deleting records. All methods are fully typed with TypeScript.

See the Store API Reference for a complete list of available methods and their usage.

tip

Stores automatically handle MongoDB connection management, collection provisioning and index creation (as you define in the indexes array). Just define your Store and start using it - Modelence takes care of the rest.