Flatten a field value's relationships

[desert forum]

Say I have a field value saved like this:

[
  {
    shop: {
      id: '63bb051e53c9a3b0f68c4a16',
      name: 'Amazon',
      createdAt: '2023-01-08T18:02:06.334Z',
      updatedAt: '2023-01-08T18:02:06.334Z'
    },
    link: 'https://www.amazon.ca/Sony-Alpha-A6400-Mirrorless-Camera/dp/B07MV3P7M8',
    link_affiliate: 'https://www.amazon.ca/Sony-Alpha-A6400-Mirrorless-Camera/dp/B07MV3P7M8',
    available: true,
    id: '63dbb707c766bf2123681699',
    price: 191.59,
    last_checked: 'Thu Mar 16 2023 15:52:48 GMT+0100 (Central European Standard Time)'
  }
]```
I'd like to use it in a payload.update, but get the error "This field has the following invalid selections for the "shop" field.

I think instead of
shop: {
      id: '63bb051e53c9a3b0f68c4a16',
      name: 'Amazon',
      createdAt: '2023-01-08T18:02:06.334Z',
      updatedAt: '2023-01-08T18:02:06.334Z'
    }
you'd need shop: '63bb051e53c9a3b0f68c4a16',

Is there a function to automatically flatten that?

or optimally a flag for payload.update to accept non flattened values

that'd really be best!

[quartz wing]

as in trying to migrate the data from one state to another?

but no theres no function like that afaik

[desert forum]

Yep! Im getting the data with a higher depth, so that the shop is actually populated. And now I want to update it

[quartz wing]

hmm yeah no function as far as I know but im not sure how useful it would really be, seems like a utility something like lodash would provide, its too situational

[pale gorge]

It may be possible to do transformations to the shape of the data for a relationship field before it updates, we may be able to handle this in Payload without changing the API at all. Where it gets hairy is when you have a relationship that is relationTo: ['many', 'different', 'collections']. It would take a little digging to see if this is feasible without adding too much complexity on the backend. I'd also have to think about how it could affect GraphQL mutations schemas.

Lastly this change give me some concerns about what happens in existing hooks that may be impacted by this change, specifically plugins that exist and may not be written to handle different shapes of incoming relationship fields.

[desert forum]

So, some kind of if(relationship?.id){relationship = relationship?.id} check (at least for relations to only one collection) before anything happens to that data?

Would be a nice QoL change! For me personally, I just manually set the shop to shop.id and it worked.

If this happens before any update happened, how would it affect any hooks or plugins though? Wouldn't they just see the relationship: id value as always?

[pale gorge]

I'm receptive to this idea because I had to write this portion of the docs because it was tripping people up: https://payloadcms.com/docs/fields/relationship#how-the-data-is-saved

So you need to map objects to each of the 4 possible shapes expected to be recieved by Payload's update operation.

It doesn't seem that bad.

You're right that if the transformation happens early, like in the beforeOperation hook, you'd be safe on breaking changes.

[desert forum]

oh yea, had to do that in that pcms backpop plugin - was a bit annoying.

What about transforming any of those shapes to one, uniform shape?

So it always looks like this

no matter if it's hasMany or just hasOne

or polymorphic / non-polymorphic

[pale gorge]

That is an interesting idea. That would break existing hooks though.
Honestly we should have done this from the beginning to avoid the problem where changing your config breaks existing data.

[quartz wing]

where changing your config breaks existing data
the upcoming ORM work should help with this right? if you make automated db migrations with schema changes

[pale gorge]

Yes true, but it is more stuff we have to handle in code and in running the migrations.
The best code is the code you don't have to write.

[quartz wing]

Slightly related to the dev exp when dealing with object fields...you cant right now do just a partial update, eg for data:

pricing: {
   price: 
   minimumPrice:
   currency:
}

with update if i want to change only one value i need to fill in the rest of the object too...so an update with

pricing: {
  price:
}

doesnt work

[pale gorge]

When you say object fields, you are talking about type: 'group' or is this more broad than that?

[quartz wing]

in this case specifically group yes, haven't encountered it with other fields as of yet

[pale gorge]

Probably the same for tabs with names, but I see your point. This should be opened as a new issue on github.

[desert forum]

@pale gorge I made this a feature request: https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/discussions/2353

Currently working with multiple, recursive relationships in a collection. Having to manually "flatten" those is a big, big, big pain, so I hope this can get added soon

Additionally, I cannot "skip" updating those. If I have a tabs field with a name, it forces me to update it even if I don't want to

[desert forum]

so this

[desert forum]

Done: https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/issues/2354

[quartz wing]

got ahead of me, nice one

[brave furnace]

@quartz wing @desert forum Update types updated to a deep partial and merged into master https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/pull/2407