Relationships normalization

Hi Yury,

I’m facing new problems with the relationships normalization:

Data representation feature

With The data repesentation feature of one-to-many relationship, we lost the type “collection” if the collection contains only one element. I have some issues here with the redux-object build function. The single element collection builded is an object instead of an array containing one object.

I agree the fact data representation as a string is useful in a redux context. A naive approach can be adding a new special key to the metas to know the type of the relation (object or collection).

I’m not confident to add a special key to store it… but there is some examples to show how it can be represented:

1. Collection with a single object

relationships: {
    comments: {
        __relation_type: 'collection',
        id: '295',
        type: 'question'
    }
}

1. Collection with multiple objects

relationships: {
    comments: {
        __relation_type: 'collection',
        id: '295,678',
        type: 'question'
    }
}

1. Object relationship

relationships: {
    author: {
        __relation_type: 'object',
        id: '23',
        type: 'author'
    }
}

The redux-object has also to be updated to understand these new properties.

Empty relationships

If a relationship has no data (null) or an empty collection ([]) and links, only the links will be normalized. We lost here the fact that the relation points to an empty data or collection. The redux-objectbuild will raise a lazy loading error when we want to access the relationship. Even if we know there is no data to return.

Following the precedent naive approach, i suggest to store only the collection type:

relationships: {
    author: {
        __relation_type: 'object',
    }
}

The redux-object has also to be updated to understand that the data is already loaded and not try to lazy load something.

I’m currently working on a prototype with this approach, but if you had any suggestions or direction, I’ll follow it and submit a PR for the community.

[yury-dymov]

Ok, I see. Will deliver update by the end of the week for both redux-object and json-api-normalizer.

PRs are also welcome 😃

[yury-dymov]

closed via PR