How to selectively populate waterline associations via query param in sails.js

Question

By default, sails will populate all relationships within a model when it's corresponding API route is hit. Does anyone know if it's possible to toggle this functionality? If I'm working with a one-to-many association, I may not want to populate the association when doing a listing of all items for performance reasons. But when viewing a single item, it would be nice to complete the population.

For example, say one ticket can have many comments. I don't care about the comments when fetching a case listing but would be important when viewing a specific case. I took a guess at how it could function but it fails:

localhost:1337/tickets?populate=false

Update

I implemented the above functionality within balderdashy/sails#1695. The only change is that you selectively choose which associations to populate using:

localhost:1337/tickets?populate=[]          // Don't populate anything
localhost:1337/tickets?populate=[comments]  // Only populate comments

This would override whatever is defined for populate within your blueprint config.

Marnamarne

Pretty sure population is not turned on by default, you have to implicitly write it in query, like User.findOne(user.id).populate('userFriends').exec(...) (just a small example out of my head) – Percolate

That is true if you are using Waterline directly. What I'm referring to is populations from a request URL which is processed by Sails blueprints. In that case, population is on by default unless you specify otherwise in config/blueprints.js with populate = false. – Marnamarne

Oh, I didn't think about blueprints, sorry. Well, you can make your own route to lead to your controller.action and return results of query depending on url GET parameters. – Percolate

I agree with @IļjaGubins. I dont think there is any way to do this using blueprint routes. You will have to override them if you want to do this – Verulamium

@jason Your solution works great. You should write the details as an answer. Btw, ?populate=false works for me (using sails-mysql adapter) – Gynecium

Answer 1

You just need to separate your assosiactions via comma, just like this:

localhost:1337/tickets?populate=comments,owner&SOME_OTHER_PARAMS

Travail

Doesn't seem to work for me. It works if I'm looking at a single record tho: tickets/123?populate=comments – Allard

this is wrong. it should be something like this localhost:1337/tickets?populate=[comments,owner]&SOME_OTHER_PARAMS – Landowska

@philip maybe it's changed in new version – Travail

what version were you guys using – Bernardabernardi