How to use it with nullable self-referential relations?

[gbirke]

I have a category entity set up like in the example that optionally points to another category, creating a parent/child relationship. The topmost categories don't have a parent (so its parent attribute is nullable)

My fixture looks like this:

entity: Category
items:
  category1:
    name: 'first'
    parent: null
    sortId: 1

I get an error when it tries to insert the fixture, because it tries to insert a second, empty category.

I've traced through the code to see what it's doing and it converts the {parent:null} from the fixture to an empty object {parent: {}} in the Entity.

[RobinCK]

Maybe this is a bug
I use the following structure https://github.com/RobinCK/typeorm-fixtures-sample/blob/master/fixtures/Category.yml

[gbirke]

Ah, that works! So the trick is to leave out the optional references in the fixture.

If you don't like digging into this (I had a look at what the builder class does but couldn't figure out if class-transformer takes the typeorm annotations into account), I think a sentence in the docs would suffice.