Load/include association for already existing instance

Not sure if this is possible. So I can fetch associations when I am finding object via include:

models.User.find({ where: { id: 1 }, include: [models.Avatar]).then(function(user) {
  user.Avatar // will have avatar object associated with user object.
});

But when I am creating user and use setter to set association, how to get user object in the end to have user.Avatar?

user.setAvatar(avatar).then(function(user) {
  user.Avatar // not defined?
});

Should I always manually assign object after setting relationship?

[felixfbecker]

Please don’t +1 issues. It clutters the thread without adding value to the discussion and spams maintainers with notifications. Use GitHub reactions to upvote features.

[ghostoy]

I’m shocked that Sequelize doesn’t support this feature. As PHPer before, we benefit this feature provided by Eloquent ORM in Laravel for a long time. I prefer to borrow the load API from Eloquent for loading nested associations with the same queries syntax as Sequelize. For example,

user.load([ { association: 'posts', include: [ 'comments' ] } ]);

Comparing to lazy load mentioned above, it would be easier to load all related associations in one call and optimize the SQL queries as much as possible.