Making and inspecting model relations for the user story system in GSOC’20

The world is full of relationships. Everything around us is connected to each other in some way or the other. Sometimes relations can be hard to figure out. Join me as I help you create a unique relation with our user story system and some of its brand new features.

What did I do this week?

This week started with full action and thrill as usual and we decided to modify our models to align with our product name. This means all existing models had to be renamed according to the user story theme on the server side. A rename operation seemed like a small and simple task but I soon realized that Strapi does not update the GraphQL schema if we rename a model. This is because existing tables are not deleted or dropped from our MongoDB database and instead new ones are created. This started breaking everything on the server side.

I rolled back and created new models for user story system and imported all data from our staging database. This time the shadow CRUD functionality generated a perfect new schema for my use case. Server was good to go.

The schema changed so the next task was to change all GraphQL queries and mutations on the client side and align them with the new user story models. The docs for the schema helped me to complete this with ease.

Next I created a new model for all the products at EOS and related it to the user story system model. This allows users to filter stories according to the product and enhances user experience by allowing them to navigate faster among hundreds of user stories. I worked on the filter feature on the client side to fetch all products and filter them according to their status and product selected by the user via a drop down.

I eagerly wanted to allow users to respond to some amazing user stories so I moved on to implement the voting feature. This allowed users to vote for any user story to express their interest. Wait. It just sounds easy but some major problems and bugs were waiting for me at the end of the week before I could push the voting system to production.

MissingSchemaError: Schema hasn’t been registered for model “user-story”

My terminal kept flashing this message as I tried to figure out the problem in my new user story vote models and relations. It is still a mystery though because the same relations work fine with my comments model. I told you relationships can be hard sometimes. :/

What is coming up next?

I will work on the voting system for user stories. This involves establishing proper relations between the user story and user models. The mystery will be solved soon.

Further I would try to think of a nice implementation for the user notification system to tell users that their wait for the next awesome feature is over. This would be implemented later this week. Users really want to make comments so lets give them that privilege first.

Did I get stuck anywhere?

MongoDB relationships represent how various documents are logically related to each other. I faced a weird problem when I was establishing a one-to-many relation between my user story vote, users and user story models. MongoDB could not identify the schema for my user story model for some reason and kept throwing an error. The bug came to us at the end of the week and I am still trying to solve the mystery with my mentors. Moving forward we created a map of all our relations to get a nice picture of all relationships and find the conflicts and resolve them.

This ended the week with lots of rain which gave me some relief from the scorching heat. Stay tuned as I solve the mystery behind relationships and add new path breaking features to the user story system. The adventure is yet to begin. :)