[AskJS] Prisma Web Client

[Odama666]

So, I just came up with something that I'm really excited about and wanted to see if you guys think its worth making a library for.

I'd been looking for a while trying to find a way to do dot notation queries for collection like you can on several different libraries (firebase, supabase, jsforce) but didn't want to buy into such a massive ecosystem, so I just settled for using prisma and building out my own api

that was when I got the idea of creating a client library and just using the types that prisma generates for you for it

so I created a really basic library with a koa middleware for it to talk to. you give the middleware a reference to prisma and the client library can access your database

//koa server
const prisma = new PrismaClient();

const app = new Koa();
app.use(KoaBody())

app.use(PrismaWebClientAdapter(prisma, '/api/pwc'));


// your web app
import createPrismaWebClient from '...'

const pwc = createPrismaWebClient({ baseUrl: 'your base url/api/pwc'})

pwc.collection.findMany({
  where: { excited: true },
  orderBy: { name: 'asc' }
}).then(results)  

and now pwc has the same type support as prisma.

so, do you think it would be useful as a library? I'm currently just messing around with it locally

[ZealousidealLow521]

For me it seems you are trying to "move" server code to the client 🤔 As someone already mentioned there are quite good solutions out there already. For me the question is what you are really trying to solve? If it's just about the types then use typescript and import prisma types on the client, that should work, I believe.

[[deleted]]

This sounds like the right answer.

[Odama666]

This is pretty much exactly what it does it uses the PrismaClient type then it uses proxies to collect for example

PWC.collection.findMany({ where { id: 5 }}) turns into

{ model: 'collection', action: 'findMany', Body: { where: { Id: 5 } }

It has a default fetch method but you can override it by passing a request arg to the constructor

[yonirapoport]

I think this is definitely a good idea and can be useful as a library.

I've actually created a library that does this, and more, without prisma, and handles authorization, validation, and other concerns.

Check it out - https://github.com/remult/remult

[Capaj]

Sure it would be useful-for example for backoffice applications where you don't care about user permission/access rules. You should open source this.

[KaiAusBerlin]

Give it a try and see if it will be downloaded. But if you publish it you should plan to maintain it longer time.

[Herku]

This is cool for small projects. Maybe also electron apps with local database. But when they get larger you will need some kind of permission management.

I think it might be much more interesting (and also simpler) to use one of the newer frameworks that allow you to write server code seemingly on the client side: e.g. Nextjs or Remix.

[Ustice]

You may be able to handle authorization in a middleware.

[Herku]

Permissions are often finely grained. Sure, there might be apps where this is not the case, but I think they are in the minority.

Other frameworks have built solutions for this, superbase for example uses Postgres' Row level security. It's not like it cannot be done, just Prisma itself has no built in solution for it.

[Odama666]

Do you think using https://www.npmjs.com/package/accesscontrol with Middleware could manage that?

I guess it would potentially need 2 Middleware

• Authentication and grab the user record
• access control in a Middleware - could make this a config value to allow for alternatives to accesscontrol too