Naming Strategy Overview

Naming Strategies

Naming strategies allow you to automatically translate between your TypeScript code (usually camelCase) and your database schema (often snake_case). This keeps your database following standard conventions while your code stays idiomatic TypeScript.

Built-in Strategies

UQL comes with two built-in naming strategies:

Strategy	Behavior
DefaultNamingStrategy	Keeps names exactly as they are in your TypeScript code.
SnakeCaseNamingStrategy	Automatically converts camelCase to snake_case.

Using a Naming Strategy

Configure the naming strategy when initializing your pool in your uql.config.ts. This affects both runtime queries and schema generation/migrations.

uql.config.ts

import { SnakeCaseNamingStrategy, type Config } from '@uql/core';
import { PgQuerierPool } from '@uql/core/postgres';

export const pool = new PgQuerierPool(
  { host: 'localhost', database: 'my_db' },
  {
    // CamelCase -> snake_case translation
    namingStrategy: new SnakeCaseNamingStrategy()
  }
);

export default {
  pool,
  migrationsPath: './migrations',
} satisfies Config;

How it works

When using SnakeCaseNamingStrategy:

• Entity: UserAccount → table user_account
• Field: createdAt → column created_at
• Relations: authorId → column author_id

Custom Naming Strategy

You can implement your own naming strategy by extending the NamingStrategy interface or inheriting from DefaultNamingStrategy.

import { DefaultNamingStrategy } from '@uql/core';

export class MyCustomNamingStrategy extends DefaultNamingStrategy {
  // Add a prefix to all table names
  override tableName(entityName: string): string {
    return `tbl_${super.tableName(entityName)}`;
  }

  // Force all column names to uppercase
  override columnName(propertyName: string): string {
    return propertyName.toUpperCase();
  }
}