Last week, I continued working on CRUD operations for an API, specifically focusing on retrieving lists from a newly created entity. The task was progressing smoothly until I reached the SQL query part. As someone new to writing SQL queries, I felt uncertain about the best approach to querying across multiple databases. In my previous experience with EF Core, I could simply use the Include() function to fetch data from related tables. However, doing the same in raw SQL required a different approach.
To handle data from multiple tables, I quickly realized that JOIN statements would be essential, so I dove into learning SQL joins. Although it seemed complex initially, I found that retrieving columns from multiple tables was not as difficult as I anticipated. Using SQL joins allowed me to efficiently pull data across related tables, achieving similar functionality to what Include() provides in EF Core but with SQL-specific syntax and nuances.
After grasping the join concepts, I moved on to testing and refining the query based on errors that emerged during execution, which helped me improve the overall structure. Once the read operation was stable, I developed the create operation for the entity and wrote tests to validate it. Although this entity will have additional table relationships that shall be integrated later, the essential read and create API functionality was successfully implemented. For now, I skipped implementing a delete operation, as it doesn’t align with the entity’s purpose; however, further discussion shall be made.
Toward the end of the week, I returned to my Next.js work, focusing on SEO-friendly dynamic routing for the project. I’m exploring the updated dynamic route handling introduced in Next.js 13, which differs from previous versions. Though I haven’t achieved the desired setup yet, I plan to continue refining this next week.