Learn Algolia, Prisma and Sequelize

(This collection is still WIP)

Databases are essential for any full-stack applications, but working with them is traditionally very difficult. Prisma is here to change that. It's a powerful database toolkit that helps us think in data itself - not SQL, not classes, just the data we care about in our apps.

In this series, we will learn how to leverage the power of Prisma to automatically generate a type-safe, autocomplete-ready, and efficient query builder, all based on a simple and easy-to-read schema. We will integrate all this good stuff into a Next.js project to complete a simple social network app.

In the end, you will be able to understand how Prisma works, and confidently start using Prisma in your own project.

Prisma is an open-source database toolkit. It replaces traditional ORMs and makes database access easy with an auto-generated query builder for TypeScript & Node.js.

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Build a full-stack app with Prisma

This collection explores one of the most promising and coolest releases of early 2020 - prisma v2. First part of the prisma infrastructure to exit experimental mode - prisma client is an auto-generated and type-safe query builder for Node.js & TypeScript. We will explore and learn it  in this collection!

Get started with Prisma v2. Prisma Client

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

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Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

In this tutorial we will spin the docker container with official postgres image and access the database with `psql` to set up an easy playground for PostgreSQL relational database.


Run postgres database in docker container

In this lesson you write initial boilerplate for prisma (spoiler: it's not bigger than this summary) with typescript infrastructure.

Create new project with prisma

In this lesson you will learn how to connect your prisma to postgres db to be able to introspect it. We will also go trough the models and touch prisma naming convention.

Connect prisma to PostgreSQL database running in docker container

In this lesson you will learn how to generate type safe orm client with `prisma generate` and do first write operation using it.

Generate type safe client with prisma

In this lesson you will learn how to perform the simplest `findOne` and `findMany` read operations from postgres database using prisma client.

Perform read operations using prisma client

In this lesson you will learn how to perform the  `update`  operations on postgres table entries using prisma client.

Perform update operations using prisma client

In this lesson you will learn how to perform the `delete` operations on postgres database table entries using prisma client.

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