Dinamically avoid certain fields in certain JSON-API response

[officer-rosmarino]

When I return a response that contains no attributes, but only the id values of the data,the attributes field still appears even if it is blank.

Basically the same thing applies to relationships. If I have defined relationship in the registered model it seems there is no way for me to send a response without the data. The only thing I can do is setting that link to null by responding null in the functions responsible to handle links.

GET example.com/v1/bands/1/relationships/musicians

{
    "jsonapi": {
        "version": "1.0"
    },
    "links": {
        "self": "http://localhost:12345/v1/bands/1/relationships/musicians"
        "related": "http://localhost:12345/v1/bands/1/musicians"
    },
    "data": [
        {
            "type": "musician",
            "id": "1",
            "attributes": {} <-- I have selected only the id in the query to the db, but still get this
           "relationships": {
                "bands": null <-- would like to avoid the field relationship at all in this case
            },
        }
    ]
}

Is there a way for me to do this?

Cheers

[danivek]

@honestserpent, I think that the best way to do this is to serialize bands resource first. Then respond with the value of musicians's relationship.

GET example.com/v1/bands/1/relationships/musicians

Serializer.serializeAsync(bandData).then((serializedBand) => { 
return serializedBand.data.relationships['musicians'];
})

[officer-rosmarino]

Thank you! That is extremely smart and almost perfect!!
"Almost" because doing that returns something a little bit different than what I want. In particular, it lacks top level meta and the jsonapi and linka fields.

I guess I can do it by putting that data in another object that also contains that information, like:

let serialized_data = await JSONAPISerializer.serializeAsync(bandData);
res.send(_.merge({ "jsonapi":{"version": "1.0"}}, serialized_data);

What do you think about something like this?

[danivek]

for meta and links you can define such these options on the serializer options on relationships (see doc). So you will have them in response. But you're right about jsonapi.

[officer-rosmarino]

thanks!