Explain how `upsert` can behave as a hypothetical `findOrCreate`

Problem

Currently, people are wondering about having a findOrCreate method in the API (https://github.com/prisma/prisma-client-js/issues/85). We also have recently introduced connectOrCreate as an experimental feature (#568).

It happens that upsert behaves like a hypothetical findOrCreate method when receiving an empty update parameter. There has been a decision to avoid adding shortcuts in the API to already supported methods to avoid unnecessarily expand the surface to test, but having a documentation update would help people figuring that out.

Suggested solutions

• We update the upsert documentation to cover the usage with an empty update parameter.
• Optionally (probably a bad idea): we add a findOrCreate section which explains one should use upsert as documented above to have this behavior

[olliechick]

What about when you want to findOrCreate based on non-unique input? (For example, finding or creating a car based on the numberplate and country.)

An upsert doesn’t work, because the where only takes unique input. I would want to do something like this:

const car = await prisma.car.findOrCreate({
  where: { licensePlate: 'ABC123', country: 'NZ' }
})

[nrxus]

There is a slight hump about this. When doing an update without any update body, the updatedAt field does not get updated. This is expected and probably desired BUT that means that it is not possible for us to tell if the retrieved entity is an existing entity or a created one. Looking for how to tell “updated vs new” led me to: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/discussions/3432 which explicitly suggests looking at the updatedAt field.

I could manually add updatedAt to the update body but that feels wrong, all I want is to find or create, and to know if it was found or created.