populate Record's relations returned from async methods

[crobinson42]

Description

When using JSData server-side, it is common to immediately return the result from an async op, ie:

...
async getUsers(req, res) {
  res.body = await containerStore.findAll('users', { active: true }, { with: ['posts'] })
}
...

The problem with the above code is that the relation field, posts will not be populated due to the Mapper's toJSON method not being invoked on each record instance with the options { with: ['posts'] }.

This is a hassle when you are required to write server-side controller methods like this:

...
async getUsers(req, res) {
  res.body = await containerStore.findAll('users', { active: true }, { with: ['posts'] }).map(user => user.toJSON({ with: ['posts'] })
}
...

Proposal

Adding an option populateRelations to the Container class that defaults to true would make sense considering a Container class is typically used in a server-side environment. When the flag is true any async methods invoked with relations with: [...] option will be populated on the Record object automatically so that common methods will capture the relation fields, ie: JSON.stringify(records) or console.log(records).

Environment

• js-data version: 3.0.x

[crobinson42]

Upon further investigation this is related to Mappers that have a schema defined and possibly the Schema class.

[crobinson42]

Consideration for recursive depth of .toJSON needs to be taken because of these computed props can become circular depending on the defined relations.