EJson export doesn't support backlinks

[derrickgw]

Problem

Backlinks in a Realm object cause a stack overflow error when exporting to EJson. This is somewhat expected, as following backlinks will certainly lead to circular references.

Solution

Ideally we would be able to annotate fields to specify how we want to export them. Maybe we some fields excluded, or other to be shallowly exported (id only).

Alternatives

Currently we can write a custom export function, but then we don't get to use the magic of auto-generated code.

How important is this improvement for you?

Would be a major improvement

Feature would mainly be used with

Local Database only

[sync-by-unito]

➤ PM Bot commented:

Jira ticket: RDART-996

[nielsenko]

@derrickgw Thank you for reporting this. Backlinks obviously shouldn't be serialized as they are guaranteed to cause cycles during serialization, and are never used during de-serialization as it is a computed value. I will fix that promptly.

But the problem can occur without backlinks as well, if you use explicit cycles in your model.

My current thinking is to track already serialized realm objects, and refer to these with DBRefs (https://www.mongodb.com/docs/v2.4/reference/mongodb-extended-json/#db-reference) to avoid cycles.

This creates another challenge with deserializing refs to (yet) unseen objects.

I expect to have this fledged out later this spring. Sorry for the inconvinience.