Autquery not including nested result when using a response DTO - servicestack

Question

Let's say you have these models:
public class Blog
{
[PrimaryKey]
[AutoIncrement]
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Url { get; set; }
public string PrivateField { get; set; }
[Reference]
public List<BlogToBlogCategory> BlogToBlogCategories { get; set; }
}
public class BlogResponse
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Url { get; set; }
public List<BlogToBlogCategory> BlogToBlogCategories { get; set; }
}
And this request:
public class BlogsLookUpRequest : QueryDb<Blog, BlogResponse>
{
}
The return value will have BlogToBlogCategories as null, but this request:
public class BlogsLookUpRequest : QueryDb<Blog>
{
}
Will have BlogToBlogCategories populated. I can manually create the query response like so with custom implementation:
var q = _autoQuery.CreateQuery(request, Request.GetRequestParams(), base.Request);
var results = _autoQuery.Execute(request,q, base.Request);
return new QueryResponse<ResponseBlog>()
{
Results = results.Results.ConvertTo<List<ResponseBlog>>(),
Offset = request.Skip,
Total = results.Total
};
Then it will have the nested results. If I decorate the collection with [Reference] then it is trying to find foreign key on non-existant BlogResponse table.
Why are referenced results removed when specifying a return model with AutoQuery? Is there a way to mark it up so it works?

Answer 1

The POCO Reference Types is used to populate Data Models not adhoc Response DTOs.
In this case it's trying to resolve references on a non-existent table, you can specify which table the DTO maps to with [Alias] attribute, e.g:
[Alias(nameof(Blog))]
public class BlogResponse
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Url { get; set; }
public List<BlogToBlogCategory> BlogToBlogCategories { get; set; }
}