ServiceStack - [Reference] or [Ignore]? - servicestack

Question

We have a DTO - Employee - with many (> 20) related DTOs and DTO collections. For "size of returned JSON" reasons, we have marked those relationships as [Ignore]. It is then up to the client to populate any related DTOs that they would like using other REST calls.
We have tried a couple of things to satisfy clients' desire to have some related Employee info but not all:
We created a new DTO - EmployeeLite - which has the most-requested fields defined with "RelatedTableNameRelatedFieldName" approach and used the QueryBase overload and that has worked well.
We've also tried adding a property to a request DTO - "References" - which is a comma-separated list of related DTOs that the client would like populated. We then iterate the response and populate each Employee with the related DTO or List. The concern there is performance when iterating a large List.
We're wondering if there a suggested approach to what we're trying to do?
Thanks for any suggestions you may have.
UPDATE:
Here is a portion of our request DTO:
[Route("/employees", "GET")]
public class FindEmployeesRequest : QueryDb<Employee> {
public int? ID { get; set; }
public int[] IDs { get; set; }
public string UserID { get; set; }
public string LastNameStartsWith { get; set; }
public DateTime[] DateOfBirthBetween { get; set; }
public DateTime[] HireDateBetween { get; set; }
public bool? IsActive { get; set; }
}
There is no code for the service (automagical with QueryDb), so I added some to try the "merge" approach:
public object Get(FindEmployeesRequest request) {
var query = AutoQuery.CreateQuery(request, Request.GetRequestParams());
QueryResponse<Employee> response = AutoQuery.Execute(request, query);
if (response.Total > 0) {
List<Clerkship> clerkships = Db.Select<Clerkship>();
response.Results.Merge(clerkships);
}
return response;
}
This fails with Could not find Child Reference for 'Clerkship' on Parent 'Employee'
because in Employee we have:
[Ignore]
public List<Clerkship> Clerkships { get; set; }
which we did because we don't want "Clerkships" with every request. If I change [Ignore] to [Reference] I don't need the code above in the service - the List comes automatically. So it seems that .Merge only works with [Reference] which we don't want to do.
I'm not sure how I would use the "Custom Load References" approach in an AutoQuery service. And, AFAIKT, the "Custom Fields" approach can't be use for related DTOs, only for fields in the base table.
UPDATE 2:
The LoadSelect with include[] is working well for us. We are now trying to cover the case where ?fields= is used in the query string but the client does not request the ID field of the related DTO:
public partial class Employee {
[PrimaryKey]
[AutoIncrement]
public int ID { get; set; }
.
.
.
[References(typeof(Department))]
public int DepartmentID { get; set; }
.
.
.
public class Department {
[PrimaryKey]
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
.
.
.
}
So, for the request
/employees?fields=id,departmentid
we will get the Department in the response. But for the request
/employees?fields=id
we won't get the Department in the response.
We're trying to "quietly fix" this for the requester by modifying the query.SelectExpression and adding , "Employee"."DepartmentID" to the SELECT before doing the Db.LoadSelect. Debugging shows that query.SelectExpression is being modified, but according to SQL Profiler, "Employee"."DepartmentID" is not being selected.
Is there something else we should be doing to get "Employee"."DepartmentID" added to the SELECT?
Thanks.
UPDATE 3:
The Employee table has three 1:1 relationships - EmployeeType, Department and Title:
public partial class Employee {
[PrimaryKey]
[AutoIncrement]
public int ID { get; set; }
[References(typeof(EmployeeType))]
public int EmployeeTypeID { get; set; }
[References(typeof(Department))]
public int DepartmentID { get; set; }
[References(typeof(Title))]
public int TitleID { get; set; }
.
.
.
}
public class EmployeeType {
[PrimaryKey]
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
}
public class Department {
[PrimaryKey]
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
[Reference]
public List<Title> Titles { get; set; }
}
public class Title {
[PrimaryKey]
public int ID { get; set; }
[References(typeof(Department))]
public int DepartmentID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
}
The latest update to 4.0.55 allows this:
/employees?fields=employeetype,department,title
I get back all the Employee table fields plus the three related DTOs - with one strange thing - the Employee's ID field is populated with the Employee's TitleID values (I think we saw this before?).
This request fixes that anomaly:
/employees?fields=id,employeetypeid,employeetype,departmentid,department,titleid,title
but I lose all of the other Employee fields.
This sounds like a "have your cake and eat it too" request, but is there a way that I can get all of the Employee fields and selective related DTOs? Something like:
/employees?fields=*,employeetype,department,title

Answer 1

AutoQuery Customizable Fields
Not sure if this is Relevant but AutoQuery has built-in support for Customizing which fields to return with the ?fields=Field1,Field2 option.
Merge disconnected POCO Results
As you've not provided any source code it's not clear what you're trying to achieve or where the inefficiency with the existing solution lies, but you don't want to be doing any N+1 SELECT queries. If you are, have a look at how you can merge disconnected POCO results together which will let you merge results from separate queries based on the relationships defined using OrmLite references, e.g the example below uses 2 distinct queries to join Customers with their orders:
//Select Customers who've had orders with Quantities of 10 or more
List<Customer> customers = db.Select<Customer>(q =>
q.Join<Order>()
.Where<Order>(o => o.Qty >= 10)
.SelectDistinct());
//Select Orders with Quantities of 10 or more
List<Order> orders = db.Select<Order>(o => o.Qty >= 10);
customers.Merge(orders); // Merge disconnected Orders with their related Customers
Custom Load References
You can selectively control which references OrmLite should load by specifying them when you call OrmLite's Load* API's, e.g:
var customerWithAddress = db.LoadSingleById<Customer>(customer.Id,
include: new[] { "PrimaryAddress" });
Using Custom Load References in AutoQuery
You can customize an AutoQuery Request to not return any references by using Db.Select instead of Db.LoadSelect in your custom AutoQuery implementation, e.g:
public object Get(FindEmployeesRequest request)
{
var q = AutoQuery.CreateQuery(request, Request);
var response = new QueryResponse<Employee>
{
Offset = q.Offset.GetValueOrDefault(0),
Results = Db.Select(q),
Total = (int)Db.Count(q),
};
return response;
}
Likewise if you only want to selectively load 1 or more references you can change LoadSelect to pass in an include: array with only the reference fields you want included, e.g:
public object Get(FindEmployeesRequest request)
{
var q = AutoQuery.CreateQuery(request, Request);
var response = new QueryResponse<Employee>
{
Offset = q.Offset.GetValueOrDefault(0),
Results = Db.LoadSelect(q, include:new []{ "Clerkships" }),
Total = (int)Db.Count(q),
};
return response;
}