What casing do you use for your collection names?

[hdodov]

I wonder how to name collections that consist of multiple words, e.g. "blog posts". Here's a relevant question on Stack Overflow about naming conventions for MongoDB collections.

I can see that Payload appears to use underscores internally, judging by the system generated _*_versions collection, where * is the slug of your collection.

[hdodov]

I think I like kebab-case the most, because URLs make more sense:

• http://localhost:3000/admin/collections/blog_posts is kind of odd
• http://localhost:3000/admin/collections/blog-posts looks great

It also establishes a visual hierarchy with Payload collections. For example, in _blog-posts_versions the dash indicates that "posts" is just part of the collection name, while the underscore indicates that "versions" is kind of a property of the collection, like how you would use a dot in JavaScript to do the same thing, i.e. blogPosts.versions. On the other hand, _blog_posts_versions establishes no such hierarchy.

[thgh]

I would say camel > snake > kebab.
Camelcase because it's idiomatic in JS. And snakecase over kebab because having collections['blog-posts'] is less awesome than collections.blog_posts. When double clicking to select a keyword, the OS handles underscore as part of the word while the dash will split it up. Also, underscore looks more like a space than a dash. To finish it off, wikipedia uses _ in URLs!

[hdodov]

Hm, valid points! However, now that I've looked at it, the official Payload site uses kebab. I wonder if they've deliberately chosen that.

[hdodov]

I just found out about an issue in MongoDB shell:

If your collection name includes special characters, such as the underscore character, or begins with numbers, then to access the collection use the db.getCollection() method in the mongo shell or a similar method for your driver.

• Stack Overflow question
• MongoDB Jira issue SERVER-445

This can't be quite annoying.

@jmikrut @DanRibbens perhaps that's a reason to avoid underscores both as a user and internally in Payload? For example, I have issues querying my _blog-posts_versions collection, because it starts with an underscore.

The prefix could simply be payload_, i.e. payload_blog-posts_versions, payload_preferences, etc.