Imperative (Decorator-free) Definition

Imperative Registration

If you prefer a functional approach or are working in an environment where decorators are disabled (such as certain edge runtimes or specific build pipelines), UQL provides an imperative API for entity registration. Crucially, this approach works without requiring experimentalDecorators or emitDecoratorMetadata in your tsconfig.json.

This approach allows you to register entities using defineEntity, which accepts a configuration object containing all the metadata typically provided by decorators.

Using `defineEntity`

With defineEntity, you can define fields, relations, indexes, and hooks directly within the configuration. This is particularly useful for dynamic entity loading or when you want to keep your class definitions clean of metadata.

import { defineEntity } from 'uql-orm';

class User {}

defineEntity(User, {
  name: 'users',
  fields: {
    id: { type: 'uuid', isId: true },
    name: { type: String },
    email: { type: String },
  },
  indexes: [
    { columns: ['name'] },
    { columns: ['email'], unique: true },
  ],
  // You can also define hooks and relations here
});

Helper Functions

To assist with type-safe imperative setup, UQL exports several helper functions:

defineField: Define field properties.
defineId: Configure primary key properties.
defineRelation: Configure relationship properties.

Advantages

Decorator-free: Works in environments without experimentalDecorators enabled.
Centralized Configuration: Define your entire schema in a single configuration object or script.
Dynamic Schemas: Easily generate entities from external metadata or JSON configurations at runtime.
Clean Classes: Keeps your domain models focused solely on properties, without metadata clutter.