Loopback - GET model using custom String ID from MongoDB

Question

I'm developing an API with loopback, everything worked fine until I decided to change the ids of my documents in the database. Now I don't want them to be auto generated.

Now that I'm setting the Id myself. I get an "Unknown id" 404, whenever I hit this endpoint: GET properties/{id}

How can I use custom IDs with loopback and mongodb?

Whenever I hit this endpoint: http://localhost:5000/api/properties/20020705171616489678000000 I get this error:

{
  "error": {
    "name": "Error",
    "status": 404,
    "message": "Unknown \"Property\" id \"20020705171616489678000000\".",
    "statusCode": 404,
    "code": "MODEL_NOT_FOUND"
  }
}

This is my model.json, just in case...

{
  "name": "Property",
  "plural": "properties",
  "base": "PersistedModel",
  "idInjection": false,
  "options": {
    "validateUpsert": true
  },
  "properties": {
    "id": {"id": true, "type": "string", "generated": false},
    "photos": {
      "type": [
        "string"
      ]
    },
    "propertyType": {
      "type": "string",
      "required": true
    },
    "internalId": {
      "type": "string",
      "required": true
    },
    "flexCode": {
      "type": "string",
      "required": true
    }

  },
  "validations": [],
  "relations": {},
  "acls": [],
  "methods": []
}

Answer 1

Your model setup (with with idInjection: true or false) did work when I tried it with a PostGreSQL DB setup with a text id field for smaller numbers.

Running a Loopback application with DEBUG=loopback:connector:* node . outputs the database queries being run in the terminal - I tried it with the id value you are trying and the parameter value was [2.002070517161649e+25], so the size of the number is the issue.

You could try raising it as a bug in Loopback, but JS is horrible at dealing with large numbers so you may be better off not using such large numbers as identifiers anyway.

It does work if the ID is an alphanumeric string over 16 characters so there might be a work around for you (use ObjectId?), depending on what you are trying to achieve.