Many-to-many relations

Explicit many-to-many relations

In an explicit many-to-many relation, the relation table is represented as a model in the Prisma schema and can be used in queries. Explicit many-to-many relations define three models:

• Two models that have a many-to-many relation, such as Category and Post
• One model that represents the relation table, such as CategoriesOnPosts (also sometimes called JOIN, link or pivot table) in the underlying database

In this example, the model representing the relation table defines additional fields that describe the Post/Category relationship - who assigned the category (assignedBy), and when the category was assigned (assignedAt):

model Post {
  id         Int                 @id @default(autoincrement())
  title      String
  categories CategoriesOnPosts[]
}

model Category {
  id    Int                 @id @default(autoincrement())
  name  String
  posts CategoriesOnPosts[]
}

model CategoriesOnPosts {
  post       Post     @relation(fields: [postId], references: [id])
  postId     Int // relation scalar field (used in the `@relation` attribute above)
  category   Category @relation(fields: [categoryId], references: [id])
  categoryId Int // relation scalar field (used in the `@relation` attribute above)
  assignedAt DateTime @default(now())
  assignedBy String

  @@id([postId, categoryId])
}

The underlying SQL looks like this:

CREATE TABLE "Post" (
    "id" SERIAL NOT NULL,
    "title" TEXT NOT NULL,

    CONSTRAINT "Post_pkey" PRIMARY KEY ("id")
);

CREATE TABLE "Category" (
    "id" SERIAL NOT NULL,
    "name" TEXT NOT NULL,

    CONSTRAINT "Category_pkey" PRIMARY KEY ("id")
);


-- Relation table + indexes --

CREATE TABLE "CategoriesOnPosts" (
    "postId" INTEGER NOT NULL,
    "categoryId" INTEGER NOT NULL,
    "assignedAt" TIMESTAMP(3) NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
    "assignedBy" TEXT NOT NULL,

    CONSTRAINT "CategoriesOnPosts_pkey" PRIMARY KEY ("postId","categoryId")
);

ALTER TABLE "CategoriesOnPosts" ADD CONSTRAINT "CategoriesOnPosts_postId_fkey" FOREIGN KEY ("postId") REFERENCES "Post"("id") ON DELETE RESTRICT ON UPDATE CASCADE;
ALTER TABLE "CategoriesOnPosts" ADD CONSTRAINT "CategoriesOnPosts_categoryId_fkey" FOREIGN KEY ("categoryId") REFERENCES "Category"("id") ON DELETE RESTRICT ON UPDATE CASCADE;

const createCategory = await prisma.post.create({
  data: {
    title: 'How to be Bob',
    categories: {
      create: [
        {
          assignedBy: 'Bob',
          assignedAt: new Date(),
          category: {
            create: {
              name: 'New category',
            },
          },
        },
      ],
    },
  },
})

const assignCategories = await prisma.post.create({
  data: {
    title: 'How to be Bob',
    categories: {
      create: [
        {
          assignedBy: 'Bob',
          assignedAt: new Date(),
          category: {
            connect: {
              id: 9,
            },
          },
        },
        {
          assignedBy: 'Bob',
          assignedAt: new Date(),
          category: {
            connect: {
              id: 22,
            },
          },
        },
      ],
    },
  },
})

const getPosts = await prisma.post.findMany({
  where: {
    categories: {
      some: {
        category: {
          name: 'New Category',
        },
      },
    },
  },
})

const getAssignments = await prisma.category.findMany({
  where: {
    posts: {
      some: {
        assignedBy: 'Bob',
        post: {
          title: {
            contains: 'Cool stuff',
          },
        },
      },
    },
  },
})

const getAssignments = await prisma.categoriesOnPosts.findMany({
  where: {
    assignedBy: 'Bob',
    post: {
      id: {
        in: [9, 4, 10, 12, 22],
      },
    },
  },
})

Implicit many-to-many relations

Implicit many-to-many relations define relation fields as lists on both sides of the relation. Although the relation table exists in the underlying database, it is managed by Prisma and does not manifest in the Prisma schema. Implicit relation tables follow a specific convention.

Implicit m-n relations makes the Prisma Client API for many-to-many relations a bit simpler (since you have one fewer level of nesting inside of nested writes).

In the example below, there's one implicit m-n-relation between Post and Category:

model Post {
  id         Int        @id @default(autoincrement())
  title      String
  categories Category[]
}

model Category {
  id    Int    @id @default(autoincrement())
  name  String
  posts Post[]
}

const createPostAndCategory = await prisma.post.create({
  data: {
    title: 'How to become a butterfly',
    categories: {
      create: [{ name: 'Magic' }, { name: 'Butterflies' }],
    },
  },
})

const createCategoryAndPosts = await prisma.category.create({
  data: {
    name: 'Stories',
    posts: {
      create: [
        { title: 'That one time with the stuff' },
        { title: 'The story of planet Earth' },
      ],
    },
  },
})

const getPostsAndCategories = await prisma.post.findMany({
  include: {
    categories: true,
  },
})

CREATE TABLE "_CategoryToPost" (
    "A" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "Category"(id) ,
    "B" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "Post"(id)
);
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX "_CategoryToPost_AB_unique" ON "_CategoryToPost"("A" int4_ops,"B" int4_ops);
CREATE INDEX "_CategoryToPost_B_index" ON "_CategoryToPost"("B" int4_ops);

CREATE TABLE "Category" (
    id integer SERIAL PRIMARY KEY
);

CREATE TABLE "Post" (
    id integer SERIAL PRIMARY KEY
);

model Post {
  id         Int        @id @default(autoincrement())
  categories Category[] @relation("MyRelationTable")
}

model Category {
  id    Int    @id @default(autoincrement())
  posts Post[] @relation("MyRelationTable")
}

Relation tables

A relation table (also sometimes called JOIN, link or pivot table) connects two or more other tables and therefore creates a relation between them. Creating relation tables is a common data modeling practice in SQL to represent relationships between different entities. In essence it means that "one m-n relation is modeled as two 1-n relations in the database".

When using Prisma, you can create relation tables by defining models similar to how you would model them as tables. The main difference is that the fields of the relation table are both annotated relation fields with a corresponding relation scalar field.

Relation tables are also often used to add "meta-information" to a relation. For example, to store when the relation was created.

Here is an example for a relation table called CategoriesOnPosts:

model Post {
  id         Int                 @id @default(autoincrement())
  title      String
  categories CategoriesOnPosts[]
}

model Category {
  id    Int                 @id @default(autoincrement())
  name  String
  posts CategoriesOnPosts[]
}

model CategoriesOnPosts {
  post       Post     @relation(fields: [postId], references: [id])
  postId     Int
  category   Category @relation(fields: [categoryId], references: [id])
  categoryId Int
  assignedAt DateTime @default(now())

  @@id([postId, categoryId])
}

In this example, the assignedAt field adds additional information about the relation between Post and Category: it specifies when the post was assigned to the category.

Note that the same rules as for 1-n-relations apply (because Post↔ CategoriesOnPosts and Category ↔ CategoriesOnPosts are both in fact 1-n-relations), which means one side of the relation needs to be annotated with the @relation attribute.

When you don't need to attach additional information to the relation, you can model m-n-relations as implicit many-to-many relations. If you're not using Prisma Migrate but obtain your data model from introspection, you can still make use of implicit many-to-many relations by following Prisma's conventions for relation tables.

Querying MongoDB many-to-many relations

This section demonstrates how to query many-to-many relations in MongoDB, using the example schema above.

The following query finds posts with specific matching category IDs:

const newId1 = new ObjectId()
const newId2 = new ObjectId()

const posts = await prisma.post.findMany({
  where: {
    categoryIDs: {
      hasSome: [newId1.toHexString(), newId2.toHexString()],
    },
  },
})

The following query finds posts where the category name contains the string 'Servers':

const posts = await prisma.post.findMany({
  where: {
    categories: {
      some: {
        name: {
          contains: 'Servers',
        },
      },
    },
  },
})