Is there a way to "un-nest" association?

[oskargargas]

Hi!

Let's say I have following models:

• Foo
• Bar
• FooBar

Foo has many FooBar.
Foo has many Bar through FooBar.

FooBar also has additional field, let's say A.

Situation:
I have access to FooBar instance but the API is not interested in FooBar. API wants to get Bar and field A from FooBar.

In JBuilder I used to do it this way:

json.partial! "bar/bar", document: foo_bar.bar
json.field_a foo_bar.a

It would put everything at the same nesting level. Something like:

{
   // from Bar model via partial
  "id": 1,
  "name": "Bar",

   // from FooBar model
  "field_a": "A"
}

Is something like that possible in Alba? In best case scenario I'd love to write it like this. Though I can't find anything alike in docs or examples.

class FooBarResource
  include Alba::Resource

  one :bar, resource: BarResource, unnest: true
  attributes :a
end

[trevorturk]

There might be a better answer for this, but one possible solution would be to simply define a method in your resource which calls the relevant method on the associated model.

[oskargargas]

Not sure how it could work. Could you explain a bit more?

I currently use something like that to access FooBar.a from Bar using delegate. But I don't see how I could access all fields of Bar from FooBar without delegating all fields from Bar to FooBar.

[trevorturk]

Yeah, that's what I mean is to delegate the other methods you need. But it would be annoying if you have a lot of them. You can define methods or use delegation in an Alba resource, though, I believe. So perhaps it's doable without too much hassle.