Serialize Relationships as null

[popovicieduard]

It would be nice to be able to serialize relationships as null since for some use cases, you want to have a computed property of multiple relationships and serialize them as null to hide them from responses, I tried using undefined but they are still showing, this code although works it's throwing a type error:

    //@ts-ignore
    serializeAs: null,

[steschwa]

I agree, that would be useful.
Anyway you can manually serialize the model using model.serialize() and hide the relationship with
relationShipProperty: undefined. This way they are not serialized to JSON.

Like so:

In a controller:

public async method({ params }: HttpContextContract) {
   const user = User.findOrFail(params.id)

   // Business logic

  return {
    ...user.serialize(),
   posts: undefined,
   postsCount: user.posts.length
  }
}

Will yield the response:

{
   "id": 1,
   .... rest user props
  "posts_count": 5
}

[thetutlage]

It will be nice if you share proper code. One liners doesn't help much

[popovicieduard]

  @manyToMany(() => Company, {
    localKey: 'id',
    pivotForeignKey: 'foobar',
    relatedKey: 'id',
    pivotRelatedForeignKey: 'foobar',
    pivotTable: 'foobar',
    pivotColumns: ['foobar'],
    serializeAs: null, //type error
  })
  public fooBar: ManyToMany<typeof Company>

[popovicieduard]

The above code works if I add a //@ts-ignore to it, so I think only relations.d.ts has to be modified.

    type ManyToManyRelationOptions<Related extends ModelRelations> = {
        pivotTable?: string;
        localKey?: string;
        pivotForeignKey?: string;
        relatedKey?: string;
        pivotRelatedForeignKey?: string;
        pivotColumns?: string[];
        serializeAs?: string; // -> becomes serializeAs?: string | null
        onQuery?(query: Related['builder'] | Related['subQuery']): void;
    };

[thetutlage]

Yup, this needs to be fixed. Happy to accept the PR if you can open one.

[popovicieduard]

sure