get-fields-for-inserted-row.md

Get Fields For Inserted Row

With Drizzle, we can insert a row with a set of values like so:

await db
  .insert(todoItems)
  .values({
    title,
    userId,
    description,
  })

The result of this is QueryResult<never>. In other words, nothing useful is coming back to us from the database.

Sometimes an insert is treated as a fire-and-forget (as long as it succeeds) or since we know what data we are inserting, we don't need the database to response. But what about values that are generated or computed by the database -- such as an id from a sequence, timestamp columns that default to now(), or generated columns.

To get all the fields of a freshly inserted row, we can tack on the returning() function (which likely adds something like returning *) to the insert query under the hood).

await db
  .insert(todoItems)
  .values({
    title,
    userId,
    description,
  })
  .returning()

This will have a return type of Array<type todoItems> which means that for each inserted row we'll have all the fields (columns) for that row.

Alternatively, if we just need the generated ID for the new row(s), we can use a partial return like so:

await db
  .insert(todoItems)
  .values({
    title,
    userId,
    description,
  })
  .returning({ id: todoItems.id })