Issues i faced with Strapi

The Headless CMS, which can be installed on premise, impressive UI & ease of development are all the reasons, why I picked it for the current project, & if you only use the API & UI to manage your data, maybe you will never run into these issues. [ 5-things-i-love-about-strapi ]

For my Use case, I would like a separately installed Postgres DB ( running in its own Docker ) & a custom server, that would connect to this DB directly, and make CRUD changes.

The same Postgres, is also what Strapi is connecting to.

ID & Unique Constraints

The ability to customize a primary key is no longer an option (for the time being). It is recommended to use the UUID plugin if you would like an additional unique, non-serial integer key. ( how-to-set-primary-key-in-strapi-other-then-id )

Well not a problem, I can always create another field, as suggested and mark it as unique

Required & Unique field

Now when i try to add an entry, from the strapi API, with the same wordId — it doesn’t allow me to. Awesome

But wait, If i were to navigate to the PostgresDB, connecting to it via pgAdmin, & move to the words table, there are no unique constraints.

Zero Unique constraints

Well what does it mean?

1. That all the unique constraint checks are only implemented at the API level. If i try to add something from the UI, it would make a call to the DB, find if there are existing values, & if so, then show the popup.
2. But the application is not taking advantage of the capabilities of the DB, given the fact that Strapi uses Knex.js , which does offer this capability.
3. In my case, it means, that the custom server will also need to implement such a check. ( unnecessary work )

I might try to add a constraint directly to the DB, but the moment, I make a change to the model & save, it will overwrite everything.

This along with the fact, that i cannot customize the primary key, implies i will need to make un-necessary calls, expecially in case of many-to-many relations.

Again all of this will be taken care of, if I am using the Strapi APIs, but anything that i wish to do on the DB directly ( with custom Apis ), will need some more work.

Array data type

Postgres provides an Array field type, & so does Knex.
In fact there is also a post, to add array type in Strapi. I tried doing this and it did not work.

The data type in itself is very useful to store a list of hobbies, tags, list of ids etc, essentially a list of strings.

There are other ways of modelling it.

1. One to many relation
2. Repeatable Components ( Strapi ) — but these are array of objects, so not applicable.
3. JSON type field with a key to hold an array.

All of these are possible solutions, but still they seem as workaround. I am hoping for the array type to work.

I will still however continue to evaluate & use Strapi for my current project. :)

As i have been evaluating Strapi & customizing it, I am also updating it here.
Customizing Strapi V4