Make relationships subrequests

[Paulmicha]

I haven't looked into devour much yet, but I'm asking in case anyone has given this a thought already :

Would it make sense to extend or replace Devour's relationship feature (see https://github.com/twg/devour#relationships) to use subrequests (see https://github.com/e0ipso/subrequests-express) ?

Edit : context : section Improve performance using subrequests from this article : https://thebrainfiles.wearebrain.com/how-to-quickly-configure-drupal-as-a-decoupled-api-first-system-8730a3623388

[Auspicus]

@Paulmicha I don't think devour automatically populates relationships like that. You can do an include using the JSON:API standard ?include={relationship} and the relationships will be populated into their respective properties but AFAIK it doesn't fetch these recursively or in any way that is likely to impact performance.

[Auspicus]

I'll go check the source to make sure they're not doing anything that might be a performance hit. If they're not I'll close this ticket and if they are maybe we can consider including @e0ipso's library or something similar.

In our higher level API drupal-jsonapi-client we have a .expand function which basically functions as a subrequest. You can use it to fetch a relationship async. If the relationship has been cached from a previous ?include then it will be fetched from cache, otherwise a separate request is made. eg:

const user = await Entity.Load('user', 'user', 'uuid', ['user_picture']) // include user_picture
const picture = await user.expand('user_picture') // fetched from cache

const user2 = await Entity.Load('user', 'user', 'uuid')
const picture2 = await user.expand('user_picture') // fetched as subrequest

[Auspicus]

@Paulmicha I read more into subrequests. They definitely have a lot of benefits, bundling multiple HTTP requests into one saves a lot of network latency.

I think this might be better handled in a higher level API. I don't see this library providing more than a binding to the JSON:API exported by Drupal. I've added a ticket to drupal-jsonapi-client to integrate devour-drupal and also look into bundling dependent requests into subrequests.

[e0ipso]

I think this might be better handled in a higher level API. I don't see this library providing more than a binding to the JSON:API exported by Drupal.

I tend to agree with this sentiment. However, I don't think that it would be very disruptive to implement:

client.subrequestsCapture();
client.get(…); // Prevents sending during capture mode.
client.post(…);
client.post(…);
client.subrequestsSend(); // Sends a single request.