[Adonis v6] Model.create behavior with nullable DateTime fields

[jvergeldedios]

I'm on Adonis 6.18.0 and Lucid 21.8.0.

This was previously brought up in this discussion, but I think it's odd behavior for it to be default: https://github.com/orgs/adonisjs/discussions/1859

Given the following model:

class Message extends BaseModel {
  @column({ isPrimary: true })
  declare id: string

  @column()
  declare messageBody: any

  @column.dateTime({ autoCreate: true })
  declare createdAt: DateTime

  @column.dateTime({ autoCreate: true, autoUpdate: true })
  declare updatedAt: DateTime

  @column.dateTime()
  declare processedAt: DateTime | null

  public markAsProcessed() {
    this.processedAt = DateTime.now()
  }

  public get isProcessed(): boolean {
    return this.processedAt !== null
  }
}

And running the following:

const message = await Message.create({ messageBody: { /* some message data */})
console.log(message.processedAt) // <-- this returns undefined

But if you follow the advice of the above post and do this instead:

const message = await Message.create({ messageBody: { /* some message data */})
await message.refresh()
console.log(message.processedAt) // <-- this returns null

My expectation is that the behavior would be that Model.create would return a Promise that resolves with the fully created record, including default null nullable fields. Is this intended behavior or a bug? If it's intended behavior there should probably be a mention of this in the Lucid docs.

[thetutlage]

Yes, this is expected, since getting database defaults will require making another DB request, something we want to avoid and should be done explicitly. However, I do agree, it should be mentioned in the docs (if not already)

[jvergeldedios]

Thanks for the reply, @thetutlage! Maybe a bit of a naive question, but I was digging into the Lucid source and I see here that for inserts the RETURNING clause only returns the primary key:
https://github.com/adonisjs/lucid/blob/21.x/src/orm/base_model/index.ts#L2248-L2255

Could the extra round trip be avoided by changing this to be RETURNING *? Is it to maintain consistent behavior across the different adapters? I know RETURNING isn't supported by all MySQL versions.

[thetutlage]

Yeah, that's the main issue. It won't work consistently across different databases and switching the database driver across environments will make your apps break (which could be super hard to debug as well).