How do I access Waterline models from grunt tasks?

Question

TL;DR - How do I use my Waterline models from within a grunt task, in a sails project?

I am attempting to create some grunt tasks within a Sails project to process a CSV file and insert data into a Postgres database. I was hoping to use Waterline for this, though was unsuccessful in connecting to the database.

I was wondering, how would I use my Waterline models from within a grunt task?

I am not overly sure of what Sails does behind the scenes to make my models accessible, though I would be very interested in understanding.

I will update in the morning with example code of what I have tried.

Answer 1

I was importing things wrong. The following works properly :

var CWD = process.cwd();
var path = require('path');

var Waterline = require('waterline');
var User = Waterline.Collection.extend(require(path.join(CWD, 'api/models/User')));

module.exports = function (grunt) {
    grunt.registerTask('seedDb', 'Given a list of addresses, assign long and lat.', function (clinicCsv, outputCsv) {
        // tell grunt this task is async
        var done = this.async();

        // create ORM
        var orm = new Waterline();
        orm.loadCollection(User);

        // initialize ORM
        orm.initialize({
            adapters: {
                'sails-postgresql': require('sails-postgresql')
            },
            connections: require(path.join(CWD, 'config/connections')).connections,
            defaults: require(path.join(CWD, 'config/models')).models
        }, function (err, ontology) {
            if (err) throw err; 

            console.log(ontology.collections);
            done();
        });
    });
};

Where api/models/User is :

module.exports = {
  identity: 'User',
  connection: 'localPostgresqlServer',

  attributes: {
    firstName: {
        type: 'string'
    },
    lastName: {
        type: 'sting'
    },
    email: {
        type: 'email'
    },
    password: {
        type: 'string'
    }
  }
};

And config/connections and config/models are in the standard Sails format. The key was specifying the connection within the model.