belongsToMany Association on the same model with a different foreign key and alias fails

What you are doing?

I have defined my association on the User model as follows

    User.belongsToMany(User, {
      through: models.Following,
      as: 'Follower',
      foreignKey: 'following_id',
    });

    User.belongsToMany(User, {
      through: models.Following,
      as: 'Following',
      foreignKey: 'follower_id',
    });

What do you expect to happen?

I did this so that I could then call user.GetFollower() and user.GetFollowing() functions. This worked fine with sequelize v3

What is actually happening?

With sequelize v4, I now get the error SequelizeAssociationError: You have used the alias Following in two separate associations. Aliased associations must have unique aliases.

If I remove the second User.belongsToMany, it solves the problem but I am no longer able to use user.getFollowing() which returns as undefined.

Dialect: mysql Database version: 5.7 Sequelize version: 4.8

P.S. I did check https://github.com/sequelize/sequelize/issues/7775. But it is not applicable to my case. I do not have the Model.associate(models) being called multiple times. I have it called only once - in the index.js file that sequelize-cli generated.

[chornbe]

That… that is not good. The longer I use it, the more I think I’m just going to write my queries as needed, and start moving away from Sequelize as a data object layer. Which stinks; in its basic form, a couple versions old, it was a great way to get basic, simple-data-model with basic relations working quickly and clearly. There’s just too much finicky tweaking the last year or two for my liking. 😦

Chris Hornberger [e-mail]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 9:38 AM, Bogdan Polovko [e-mail] wrote:

I’m trying to update to Sequelize 4. In my case I have two models using the same alias. That’s how front-end expects it to be:

Clinic.belongsTo(Location, { as: ‘location’, foreignKey: ‘locationId’ });Location.hasOne(Clinic, { as: ‘location’, foreignKey: ‘locationId’ }); Company.belongsTo(Location, { as: ‘location’, foreignKey: ‘locationId’ });Location.hasOne(Company, { as: ‘location’, foreignKey: ‘locationId’ });

Why should this throw an error, what’s wrong with using two same aliases on two different models? Is there a way to disable it? Otherwise all our front-end applications will have to be updated, which is insane amount of work.

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