How can I flatten a nested reference?

Lets say we have the normal Department entity, but we want the Employee entity to only show the department name, not the fully department object, e.g.:

interface Employee : Entity<Employee> {
    val id: Int?
    var name: String
   ...
    var departmentName: String
}

How would we define our bindings to accommodate this without storing the department name on the employee table?

object Employees : Table<Employee>("t_employee") {
    val id by int("id").primaryKey().bindTo { it.id }
    val name by varchar("name").bindTo { it.name }
   ...
    val departmentId by int("department_id").references(Departments) { /* somehow map this to deptName*/ }
}

[vincentlauvlwj]

In this case, I’d prefer creating a DTO class and returning that instead, which is a general way as far as I know:

interface Employee : Entity<Employee> {
    val id: Int
    val name: String
    val department: Department

    fun toEmployeeDTO() = EmployeeDTO(
        id = id,
        name = name,
        departmentName = department.name
    )
}

data class EmployeeDTO(
    val id: Int,
    val name: String,
    val departmentName: String
)

[raderio]

Also this will be solved by https://github.com/vincentlauvlwj/Ktorm/issues/100