Allow model definitions to be split across several hapi plugins about dogwater HOT 1 CLOSED

Been thinking about this. My original thought was that dogwater would be able to be registered multiple times. Each time would simply aggregate options (models, connections, adapters, defaults, etc.) until the server was initialized, at which point it would also initialize waterline with all the aggregated options.

This sounds great, and allows plugins to independently register dogwater as needed, without having to think about what other plugins are doing. The downside, however, is that dogwater would never get access to its parent plugin's realm. And that means dogwater has no way to track which collections belong to which plugin! Until hapijs/hapi#3066 is considered, the only way for a plugin to utilize another plugin's realm is with server decorations (like loveboat's server.routeTransforms()).

So my thought is to,

1. Make dogwater a connectionless plugin that gets registered once– this registration could provide some global connections and collections. Think of this as a top-level plugin on your server– all other plugins that want to use it must declare dogwater as a dependency.
2. Provide a server decoration that can be used to register collections that are sandboxed to the current realm/plugin. E.g. server.dogwater({ connections, models, adapters }).

What confuses me is that I could also allow dogwater to be registered multiple times and keep the server decoration. But then I could only sandbox models registered using the decoration, and folks would surely use dogwater all sorts of different bizarro ways.

CC @mattboutet

from dogwater.