Cannot access $_related in Child class of \yii\db\ActiveRecord

[mfrancis107]

Currently $_related is a private property and there is no public or protected method to get $_related without specifying a key. Either $_related needs to be made protected or there needs to be a getRelated function that returns all. Without either of those, a class extending ActiveRecord can not access all of $_related.

[cebe]

Why do you need to access it? You can get all relation data via $model->relationName and populate data via $data->populateRelation('relationName', $data)

[mfrancis107]

As an example.

Creating an API that returns json.

Let's say Users have Orders. In which we want a GET request that returns the user object with orders.

{ id: 1,
 name: 'Bob',
 orders: [
    {id: 1, name: 'Order 1'},
    {id: 2, name: 'Order 2'},
 ]
}

Currently, Json::Encode($user); will only output the database columns of the user table, because of the toArray method is limited. If one wanted to override the toArray method to include the $_related, they could not do so without specifically building a new array object that is manually populated like below:

public function toArray(){
    $data = new Array();
    $data = $this->attributes();
    $data['users'] = $this->users;
    return $data;
}

It would be nice to be able to do something like:

public function toArray(){
    $data = new Array();
    $data = $this->attributes();
    $data = array_mrege($data, $this->_related);
    return $data;
}

That way if I chose to do $user = User::find()->with('orders')->with('phone_numbers'); Both the orders and phone_numbers would be output in the json.

[cebe]

Yeah I see your point. What I also found to be nice would be when __isset() would consider relational data as set when loaded and not set when not loaded.