EPIC: Support constraints and indexes with names that have invalid characters in Javascript

Problem

Right now if you have the following schema:

model A {
  a  Int
  b  Int
  @@unique([a, b], name: "no-dupes")
}

You’ll end up with a generated client with syntax errors. This is because we use the name of @@unique in our generated code. In Javascript, you can’t have identifiers with a dash (e.g. -).

This problem also applies to our other constraints like @@id and @@index. For @@index, we don’t currently expose the name to the client so it’s not a problem for us yet (and it may never be).

Suggested solution

Similar to our @map() at the field level, we could introduce:

@@unique([a, b], name: "noDupes", map: "no-dupes")

In this case name could be optional since its final form would be dependent on the language.

As for which characters should we add map to, I think most languages have a fairly standard concept of identifiers. We could allow names [A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]* without map, every other name gets a map.

Alternatives

It might also make sense to be more precise and investigate our usage of @@id, @@unique. If we’re using them as keys, we could get away with adding quotes around them. For example, { "no-dupes": ... } is valid Javascript syntax.

Another idea that would also solve this issue: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/4010

Engine Tasks

• https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/issues/1037
• https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/issues/1038
• https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/issues/1039
• https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/issues/1040

References

• Community Issue: #2393.
• More discussion about the problem: https://prisma.slack.com/archives/CCWDULGUW/p1613539035068300

[janpio]

Issue https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/3964 reported the exact same problem and was closed as a duplicate of this - but includes a great real world example that came from just using Prisma.

[do4gr]

This is now available via the namedConstraints preview flag since 2.29. See https://www.prisma.io/docs/guides/upgrade-guides/upgrading-to-use-preview-features/enabling-named-constraints