I’ve been struggling lately to find an appropriate way to handle models correctly, In one hand, these noSQL DBs such CouchDB have great flexibility and I didn’t want to ruin that with a blowing up ORM framework, in the other hand once the application grows a little bit more than a contact list app, then things become messy.

While writing a larger app with Node, I find myself struggling with finding solutions to problems such: (there are few more but these are the main)

• Validating a document (model) properties (application level) before storing it in the DB.
• A minimal schema where each attribute is defined per model to ensure no allowed attributes leaks into the model.
• Automatically convert a property value when a value is set.
• Filter critical, sensitive attributes when transfering the model on the wire to external clients.
• Updating an existing domain via an accessibility-aware method (you may want users to update their profile but not letting them directly change their password attribute)

So I couldn’t really find a good module to achieve all of that without sticking a giant into my lightweight app, so I built one, it’s named nodejs-model, available here: https://github.com/asaf/nodejs-model

For now, read the docs on the github repo for more info, i will post series of posts about nodejs-model in the near future.