Sailsjs and Associations - sails.js

Question

Getting into sails.js - enjoying the cleanliness of models, routes, and the recent addition of associations. My dilemma:
I have Users, and Groups. There is a many-many relationship between the two.
var User = {
attributes: {
username: 'string',
groups: {
collection: 'group',
via: 'users'
}
}
};
module.exports = User;
...
var Group = {
attributes: {
name: 'string',
users: {
collection: 'user',
via: 'groups',
dominant: true
}
}
};
module.exports = Group;
I'm having difficulty understanding how I would save a user and it's associated groups.
Can I access the 'join table' directly?
From an ajax call, how should I be sending in the list of group ids to my controller?
If via REST URL, is this already accounted for in blueprint functions via update?
If so - what does the URL look like? /user/update/1?groups=1,2,3 ?
Is all of this just not supported yet? Any insight is helpful, thanks.

Answer 1

Documentation for these blueprints is forthcoming, but to link two records that have a many-to-many association, you can use the following REST url:
POST /user/[userId]/groups
where the body of the post is:
{id: [groupId]}
assuming that id is the primary key of the Group model. Starting with v0.10-rc5, you can also simultaneously create and a add a new group to a user by sending data about the new group in the POST body, without an id:
{name: 'myGroup'}
You can currently only add one linked entity at a time.
To add an entity programmatically, use the add method:
User.findOne(123).exec(function(err, user) {
if (err) {return res.serverError(err);}
// Add group with ID 1 to user with ID 123
user.groups.add(1);
// Add brand new group to user with ID 123
user.groups.add({name: 'myGroup'});
// Save the user, committing the additions
user.save(function(err, user) {
if (err) {return res.serverError(err);}
return res.json(user);
});
});

Answer 2

Just to answer your question about accessing the join tables directly,
Yes you can do that if you are using Model.query function. You need to check the namees of the join tables from DB itself. Not sure if it is recommended or not but I have found myself in such situations sometimes when it was unavoidable.
There have been times when the logic I was trying to implement involved a lot many queries and it was required to be executed as an atomic transaction.
In those case, I encapsulated all the DB logic in a stored function and executed that using Model.query
var myQuery = "select some_db_function(" + <param> + ")";
Model.query(myQuery, function(err, result){
if(err) return res.json(err);
else{
result = result.rows[0].some_db_function;
return res.json(result);
}
});
postgres has been a great help here due to json datatype which allowed me to pass params as JSON and also return values as JSON