Archive for April 12th, 2017

Datomic: Relationships and refs within a transaction

Wednesday, April 12th, 2017

Not being able to figure this out is what killed all my previous attempts to use Datomic.

You want to transact two Entities that have a relationship between them. You’ve tried all the different variations that Google shows you, but they all give you :db.error/not-an-entity

What you want is the TWO ARGUMENT version of #db/id

Here, Verna gets a Temporary ID of -1 in this transaction. We can then reference that same Temporary ID later under :mother

This of course assumes that you have a Schema that defines :mother as a Datomic Reference, such as:

Also note that #db/id is simply a Tagged Element (similar to a reader macro), not an inline function or symbol reference or anything else.