Serializing related items (for HTMx view)

[garvanwalshe]

Hi, I'm testing out loco, which I'm really impressed with, but I'm having one problem here that probably has a very obvious solution even if it hasn't occurred to me yet.

I have a table of geographical reagions in which one column is a self-referencing key, so that it can record which regions are in other regions (eg: Dublin is in Leinster which is in Ireland...) but when it's serialised to a view it only returns the id of the containing region, whereas I want to display its name in the views.

The generators have correctly produced the appropriate self-reference in sea-orm.

Is there currently a way to have the serialiser follow relations (up to a certain depth perhaps), rather than stopping at the ids? I know there are other places one could follow them - in the controller, or even in the view, but this seems to me to be the cleanest way of at least reading from linked models.

Or would I have to rewrite the serializers/deseriallizers to do that, and if so does the community have views on whether that's a good idea?

[askor]

You could have your Model for GeographicalRegion be something like

GeographicalRegion {
    name: String,
    containing_region: Option<GeographicalRegion>,
}

and serialize it like that i believe. Then you fetch the region and containing with .find_related().
You would have to make the reference to itself null-able in the migration tho