How to get an array into SQlite3 with Express + Knex + Node.js?

Question

Working on a recipe type app and I am working on the routes/endpoints/backend. Team wants the following JSON structure for when reaching the GET request.

const fakeDataRecipes = [
    {
        id:0,
        title:"PBJ",
        source:"Mother",
        ingredients:["bread", "peanut butter", "jam"],
        instructions: "1. Get bread. 2. Get peanut butter and jam. 3. Put together.",
        category:["snack", "dinner", "vegetarian", "sandwich"],
        user_id:1
    }, 
    {
        id:1,
        title:"Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwich",
        source:"Uncle Steve",
        instructions: "1. Get bread. 2. Get peanut butter. 3. Slice banana. 4. Put together",
        ingredients:["bread", "peanut butter", "banana", "chocolate"],
        category:["snack", "dinner", "vegetarian", "sandwich"],
        user_id:2
    }
];

I have searched but I seems SQLITE3 does not support arrays in columns. what is the best approach to this situation? I need ingredients & category to be an array. Some people say Create a new table for the ingredients & category. Others says to use a blob data type in SQLite3 which I am not familiar with. Or Just store it as a string and then then covert it to array which I am not sure would work or create problems for the front end. the following is the knex migration file

exports.up = function(knex) {

  return knex.schema.createTable('recipes', recipeColumn=>{

    recipeColumn.increments();
    recipeColumn.text('title').unique().notNullable();
    recipeColumn.text('source').unique().notNullable();


  })

};

Answer 1

Normalising into separate tables is the way to go here:

`recipes`: (`title`, `source`)
`ingredients`: (`name`)
`recipes_ingredients`: (`recipe_id`, `ingredient_id`, `quantity`)
`categories`: (`name`)
`categories_recipes`: (`recipe_id`, `category_id`)

As a brief example, to pull the ingredients array for each recipe:

knex.select('name')
  .from('ingredients')
  .join('recipes_ingredients')
  .on('recipes_ingredients.ingredient_id', '=', 'ingredients.id')
  .where('recipes_ingredients.recipe_id', recipeId)

(Not tested, but it'll look something like that). In other words, use the join table as glue to retrieve the results you're after.

Oh, and see also this answer .