Unable to update collection items with manually entered string primary keys

[azrikahar]

Describe the Bug

When we're updating the manually entered string as primary key of an item, it seems like the API request correctly sends the updated value, but the API response returns the old value:

chrome_BpF97sfBig.mp4

To Reproduce

1. Create a collection with manually entered string as primary key.
2. Create an item in said collection by entering a string as the primary key.
3. Try to edit the item and update the ID and save it, but it seems like it is not being saved.

Errors Shown

No errors are shown.

What version of Directus are you using?

9.20.4 (45eb494)

What version of Node.js are you using?

18.10.0

What database are you using?

Postgres 14

What browser are you using?

Chrome

How are you deploying Directus?

running locally in dev

[licitdev]

I believe this is due to the primary key being filtered from the update payload.

directus/api/src/services/items.ts

Line 558 in 45eb494

const payloadWithoutAliasAndPK = pick(payloadWithA2O, without(fields, primaryKeyField, ...aliases));

I am wondering when should changes to IDs be allowed.
Should the updating of primary key be allowed for integer / uuid PKs too? 🤔

[rijkvanzanten]

Tricky.. When there's foreign keys in place to those primary keys, the database should ensure that the correct triggers are fired. That being said, there's most likely going to be databases that don't have foreign key constraints, in which case this might cause some serious issues if we don't reimplement foreign key checks in directus itself

[rijkvanzanten]

Linear: ENG-137

[VladDigitalOriginal]

@rijkvanzanten are you planning to provide the ability to update manually entered primary keys, or has this feature/bug been forgotten?

[rijkvanzanten]

are you planning to provide the ability to update manually entered primary keys

Eventually, yes! My comment above is still relevant: #16472 (comment)

As of right now, we don't allow updating PKs (auto-increment integers, UUIDs, or otherwise) because of that comment.

or has this feature/bug been forgotten?

Nope, it's an open issue 👍🏻 There hasn't been any activity on this issue (no upvotes or comments), so it's a lower priority for us

[VladDigitalOriginal]

Thank you, @rijkvanzanten !

There hasn't been any activity on this issue (no upvotes or comments)

Made more activity in the hope that you will reevaluate this issue :)

[jjeising]

Thank you! We're using this with key → value tables, e.g. for translations and would also welcome an improvement here.

[JonasGruenwald]

As I wrote in my closed issue:

I understand that directus may not want to allow updating primary keys for some internal reason, but I think in that case an error message should be shown, as the current behavior is confusing since the edit seems to succeed but does not

[mahendraHegde]

@rijkvanzanten I was thinking, we have directus_relations with the relations metadata, so cant we do a find and update on all relational tables(for DBs that dont support cascade updates)? or am i missing something?