Foreign key snippets

Handy snippets to help you set up Postgres to work with Whalesync

Whalesync supports foreign keys. After creating your tables, you can designate a foreign key and then point it to another table's primary key.

ALTER TABLE public."Table"
ADD CONSTRAINT table_category_fkey
FOREIGN KEY ("category")
REFERENCES categories("name");

In the example above we are adding to a table called "Table" to an existing column called "category" a foreign key pointing to column called "name" in a table called "categories". The example creates the foreign key relationship, it does not create any tables and columns, they must already all exist.

About foreign key arrays

Unfortunately, Postgres does not support arrays of foreign keys. Some of the other apps we connect with (e.g. Airtable) do, so we've tried to build a workaround for this. With this workaround you'll be able to sync Airtable linked records with a fake Postgres foreign key array.

How it works

At a high-level, you can configure a Postgres column to be an array BUT signal to Whalesync that you'd like us to treat it as a foreign key array.

Since Postgres just sees this as an array, the field no longer has the same validation, but it will sync.

Note: a bad value here will not break Whalesync, that value will simply not sync until you correct it.

How do I implement this?

Imagine you have two tables:

Contacts
Company

To create a foreign key array you can:

Ensure both tables have a primary key (e.g. uuid)
In Company, create an array column "People_fk_Contacts" with type uuid[] to match the type of the table id.
1. The "_fk" designates to Whalesync that you want this to be a foreign key.
2. The "_Contacts" designates that it should point to the Contacts table.
(*note - must match capitlization)
Set up your sync in Whalesync as normal, mapping your fields.

Example snippet

CREATE TABLE public."Contacts" (
"id" uuid PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT gen_random_uuid(),
"Email" text );

CREATE TABLE public."Company" (
"id" uuid PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT gen_random_uuid(),
"Name" text,
"People_fk_Contacts" uuid[] );

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Last updated 11 months ago

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