Serializer pulls relations when belongs_to declared but not included

[youroff]

Expected behavior vs actual behavior

As long as belongs_to relationship is not declared in include parameter, it shouldn't be loaded during serialization. Currently it's loaded.

Steps to reproduce

class MembershipSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer
  attributes :id, :position

  belongs_to :organization
  belongs_to :user
end

And in controller:

respond_with @memberships, meta: meta_data

Environment

ActiveModelSerializers 0.10.0.rc4
ruby 2.3.0p0 (2015-12-25 revision 53290) [x86_64-darwin15]
Rails 4.2.4

[NullVoxPopuli]

for ember, I know it uses those ids to get the associations... but I've been reading that it's better to use links for associations -- so that would mean the associations defined in the serializer would only be used with the include option.

@rails-api/ams Do you think disabling auto-getting ids for the relationships hash should be toggleable via some option?

[youroff]

Providing the ids is good, because right, ember-data uses that, but in case of 'belongs_to' association it doesn't require pulling whole related objects. We have ids right on a parent model and probably their class (to generate type attribute) can be taken from reflection, I guess.

[NullVoxPopuli]

Well, what was mentioned in #1555 is that if you have a ton of related records via has-many, it would throw that ton of ids into your model without a choice.

I think the broader issue here is that ids are always pulled in to the resulting json, but aren't always desired.

[youroff]

Well, yeah... maybe fields param could be useful here? Or any other mean to control what will be included in resulting json. As for pulling ids when they are needed, it's not a problem, as active_record does pretty good job with include. And if I wanted better performance for this whole thing, I would generate json right out of the database, like stored procedures in Postgresql.

[bf4]

I think the bug here is same as #1555 (comment) that relationships in jsonapi should not be called when not included

[NullVoxPopuli]

Ok, will I can confirm that this is the behavior that is currently happening, cause I see it in my ember app.

[bf4]

They're not being rendered, right? Just queried?

On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 8:43 AM L. Preston Sego III notifications@github.com
wrote:

Ok, will I can confirm that this is the behavior that is currently
happening, cause I see it in my ember app.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1552 (comment)
.

[NullVoxPopuli]

not the whole model, no. just the relationship list of ids and types per relationship.

[youroff]

Which is correct, I assume. The only problem that it makes unnecessary queries to db.