EntityHelper and Decorated Entities

Updating Entity Values with entity.assign()

When you want to update entity based on user input, you will usually have just plain string ids of entity relations as user input. Normally you would need to use em.getReference() to create references from each id first, and then use those references to update entity relations:

const jon = new Author('Jon Snow', 'snow@wall.st');
const book = new Book('Book', jon);
book.author = orm.em.getReference<Author>(Author, '...id...');

Same result can be easily achieved with entity.assign():

import { wrap } from 'mikro-orm';

wrap(book).assign({ 
  title: 'Better Book 1', 
  author: '...id...',
});
console.log(book.title); // 'Better Book 1'
console.log(book.author); // instance of Author with id: '...id...'
console.log(book.author.id); // '...id...'

To use entity.assign() on not managed entities, you need to provide EntityManager instance explicitly:

import { wrap } from 'mikro-orm';

const book = new Book();
wrap(book).assign({ 
  title: 'Better Book 1', 
  author: '...id...',
}, { em: orm.em });

By default, entity.assign(data) behaves same way as Object.assign(entity, data), e.g. it does not merge things recursively. To enable deep merging of object properties, use second parameter to enable mergeObjects flag:

import { wrap } from 'mikro-orm';

book.meta = { foo: 1, bar: 2 };

wrap(book).assign({ meta: { foo: 3 } }, { mergeObjects: true });
console.log(book.meta); // { foo: 3, bar: 2 }

wrap(book).assign({ meta: { foo: 4 } });
console.log(book.meta); // { foo: 4 }

WrappedEntity and wrap() helper

IWrappedEntity is interface that defines helper methods as well as some internal properties provided by the ORM:

interface IWrappedEntity<T, PK extends keyof T> {
  isInitialized(): boolean;
  populated(populated?: boolean): void;
  init(populated?: boolean, lockMode?: LockMode): Promise<this>;
  toReference(): IdentifiedReference<T, PK>;
  toObject(ignoreFields?: string[]): Dictionary;
  toJSON(...args: any[]): Dictionary;
  assign(data: any, options?: AssignOptions | boolean): this;
  __uuid: string;
  __meta: EntityMetadata;
  __em: EntityManager;
  __initialized?: boolean;
  __populated: boolean;
  __lazyInitialized: boolean;
  __primaryKey: T[PK] & Primary<T>;
  __serializedPrimaryKey: string & keyof T;
}

Users can choose whether they are fine with polluting the entity interface with those additional methods and properties, or they want to keep the interface clean and use the wrap(entity) helper method instead to access them.

To keep all methods available on the entity, you can use interface merging with WrappedEntity<T, PK> that both extends AnyEntity<T, PK> and defines all those methods.

@Entity()
export class Book { ... }
export interface Book extends WrappedEntity<Book, 'id'> { }

Then you can work with those methods directly:

book.meta = { foo: 1, bar: 2 };
book.assign({ meta: { foo: 3 } }, { mergeObjects: true });
console.log(book.meta); // { foo: 3, bar: 2 }