Updating ActiveModel with deeply nested ActiveModel structure after the fact

[leuchthelp]

Hey there,

I'm currently in the process of implementing my indexing logic for a music library.

Repo can be found here

I'm currently getting the following runtime error (all below). Sadly the error is not really helpful as it doesn't quite tell me where I went wrong. There also seems to be no error in the sql which is strange.

This probably boilds down to me abusing sea-orm but I sadly cannot figure out where exactly I might be going wrong.

What this is meant to do is described in the following:

The existing model is a providers::ActiveModelEx. This is being initialized & lives at runtime to allow a user to authenticated against a Provider & gain access to the media saved with that Provider.

Media is being indexes as a MediaItem which represents some album, playlist, genre, audio, etc.. A Provider knows which items it has provided which is why it gets updated with that information during indexing & only gets updated once indexing succeeds. I.e. the call to .add_media_item() updates a Clone of the current providers::ActiveModelEx & writes it back once finished.

Since I understand updating, saving to require some ActiveModel this is what I opted to implement since it has the added benefit of automatically bundling the entire operation into one single Transaction, but I am unsure if this is really the correct / intended way of doing something like this.

Effectively the same thing now happens further down the callstack as a MediaItem can have multiple Images, Parents or similar metadata in the form of Content.

So what a providers::ActiveModelEx saves at the very end of this call would look a little something like this:

/*
providers::ActiveModelEx: -> 1 ... N: media_items::ActiveModelEx 

media_items::ActiveModelEx: -> 1 ... N: images::ActiveModelEx
media_items::ActiveModelEx: -> 1 ... N: (parents) media_items::ActiveModelEx
media_items::ActiveModelEx: -> 1 ... N: content::ActiveModelEx

images::ActiveModelEx: -> 1 ... N: providers::ActiveModelEx
*/

I would really appreciated some insight & some help once this.

Thanks in advance.

---

2026-08-21T10:46:31.836631Z  WARN journey_provider::jellyfin::jellyfin_provider: None of the records are updated

thread 'jellyfin::jellyfin_provider::variant_jellyfin::try_auth_flow' (175161) panicked at journey-provider/src/jellyfin/jellyfin_provider.rs:561:32:
called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: FailedDbInsertError("None of the records are updated with specific: None")
note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace


failures:
    jellyfin::jellyfin_provider::variant_jellyfin::try_auth_flow

test result: FAILED. 3 passed; 1 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.81s

Heres the offending code:

async fn index_by_type(
        &mut self,
        user_id: &str,
        kind: Vec<BaseItemKind>,
    ) -> ProviderResult<()> {
        let items = self.get_items(user_id, kind).await?;

        let tasks = items.iter().map(|item| self.build_media_item(item));
        let media_items = try_join_all(tasks).await?;

        let mut model = self.get_model().await;
        for item in media_items {
            model = model.add_media_item(item);
        }

        let model = match model.save(&get_conn().await?).await {
            Ok(model) => model.into_active_model(),
            Err(err) => {
                return Err(ProviderError::FailedDbInsertError(format!(
                    "{} with specific: {:#?}",
                    err,
                    err.sql_err()
                )));
            }
        };

        self.set_model(model).await;
        Ok(())
    }

[leuchthelp]

To better debug I serialized the whole execution as try_join_all(tasks).await?; might shadow other executions.

And I moved the .save() call to one of the earlier steps where ActiveModel's are created, which has the same effect as doing in it on the nested ActiveModel

[sambai-dev]

[Huliiiiii]

Please don't use LLMs to generate replies. This is neither helpful nor respectful, and it violates our AI policy

[sambai-dev]

My bad, I am sorry bro