Learn about designing models with containers in mind.


Containers in Stacklane are an important modeling concept. They create a strong one-to-many, or parent/child relationship. A container may have many kinds of children, but a child may only have one kind of container/parent. For example, List ▶ Note and List ▶ Task, but there would never be another parent for "Task" besides "List". The container (parent) is always a Universal type.

All contained models have a reference back to their container. This method is the same name as the container model, but with a lower case first letter. Given a container named List and contained model named Task, the back reference method would be task.list()

One Level Deep

Containers may be one level deep — one parent container may have any number of contained types, however those child types may not themselves be containers.

Keep in mind that model links are another way to maintain model associations.

Access Control

Containers are an important access control point. Any roles specifically associated between a user and a container will be in effect for the container and its descendants.

For more information see the document on User Profiles.

Unique Values

If a model type within a container defines unique values, then those unique values are local/specific to a given container.

For example, given Blog ▶ Post, where Post has a UID field named "slug". If there are many Blog's, and many Posts within any given Blog, then two Posts may have the same UID if they are in separate Blog's.