Lifecycle hooks for crud operations.

[PrinceShaji]

Problem

Sometimes there's a need to run certain function before a record is added or maybe create another record or execute certain workflow after a record is created/deleted (eg: trigger websocket events), and it is useful to have away to tap into those lifecycle events.

Alternatives

Strapi has a great way of handling lifecycle events. Linking doc here.

[millsp]

Hey there. I think you could build this with middlewares already. However, we will be bringing a way to write custom extensions for Prisma Client. I see this one could be built directly via $use, which is a better alternative to middlewares. I can also imagine this being a top-level (client) extension. To learn more about this, you can read our proposal.

[dzcpy]

This is really useful. Probably is also the only reason I can't use Prisma

[thebiglabasky]

Hi @dzcpy, would you be able to elaborate why middlewares aren't meeting your expectations specifically? That would help to understand the differences which may exist between them and what you imagine this feature request to be.
Thank you!

[dzcpy]

Hi @thebiglabasky, thanks for your reply.

I'm building an ecommerce platform using nestjs. There are a lot of enttities like orders, products, users etc., they are written in different modules. For a lot of them, I need to create lifecycle hooks, for example before updating some records, I'll do basic data validation, change the data user has input and then update some other entities.

So basically my needs can be concluded as the following:

1. Entity level lifecycle hooks (for a specific entity instead of a global middleware).
2. Data validation
3. Ability to modify the data before update / insert
4. Change some other records before and after insert / update / delete

For 2 and 4 it's better to put them in one place because in some cases, I'll need to change other records even when validation has failed

Also, I would like it to be modular because there are too many entities, using middleware to do it seems to be a bit inconvinient in term of maintainability. And if I use a midduleware for each single entities it's kind of cumbersome that if I update an entity then all other middlewares which don't have anything to do with this entity will still be run.

I'm new to Prisma so I'm not sure if there's already some ways to do it (elegantly). If so, it would be awesome to have some examples for Prisma beginners like me to learn. Thanks!

[thebiglabasky]

Thanks for the additional details 🙏