Parse method is not applied after save

Hey everyone,

I’m not sure if the following behaviour is a bug or if it’s wanted. Help appreciated 😃

I’m using the bookshelf-camelcase plugin that camelcases column names when working with a model and transforms them back to snake_case when saving to the database. It uses the format and parse methods.

Everything works as expected when I fetch a model:

new User({id: 3}).fetch().then(function(user) {
  console.log(user);
});

results in

{
  "id": 3,
  "name": "John",
  "createdAt": "2015-12-31T14:25:48.000Z",
  "updatedAt": "2015-12-31T14:50:28.000Z"
}

However, when I create a new object and save it:

new User({name: "Ann"}).save().then(function(user) {
  console.log(user);
});

user looks as follows:

{
  "id": 4,
  "name": "Ann",
  "created_at": "2015-12-31T14:25:48.000Z",
  "updated_at": "2015-12-31T14:50:28.000Z"
}

Notice the snake case of created_at and updated_at.

The documentation states that the format method is applied after a fetch. So this behaviour might be wanted. If so, why? And what would be the best way to deal with it?

Thanks a lot.

[ricardograca]

@fredrikolovsson Well spotted. Parse and format really are confusing (#668).

I think better than an option would be for Bookshelf to just do the right thing. I think it’s safe to say that after a save all the attributes should be parsed again. Either that or fix the corner case of timestamps not being parsed at all after save if they’re not part of the attributes to save. @rhys-vdw What do you think?

[fredrikolovsson]

@cauboy & @ricardograca, I believe format should be replaced with parse in the issue name and the first two comments (the documentation link in the first comment correctly points to parse) 😄

As an alternative to doing refresh() or overriding save(), I tried parsing the response attributes, which worked for me. Going back to the original example it would be like this instead:

new User({name: "Ann"}).save().then(function(user) {
  console.log(user.parse(user.attributes));
});

@ricardograca do you think it would make sense to add [parse=false] bool as an option to save()? If yes, I could try to make a PR for it.