Fetching nested resources

[pareeohnos]

I might be missing something, but I can't quite figure out how to retrieve nested resources when they aren't returned in the original resources response. I have a user model, that is linked to other users. When a user logs into the app, it retrieves the user resource, but this does not provide the linked users. I then have a separate route setup to retrieve them, such as

/users/1/friends

How can I retrieve these? Obviously I can't do [User remoteAll] as this will just request /users but I can't seem to find anything explaining how this might be possible?

[dingbat]

+ (void) remoteAllViaObject:(NSRRemoteObject *)parentObject

So, something like:

[Friend remoteAllViaObject:user async:<block>];

:)

[pareeohnos]

Ahhh perfect! So I'd need to create a new model then for friends, even though it's the same model in the Rails app? I guess I could just extend the User model for simplicity though :)

[dingbat]

Ah, interesting. Yeah, making a Friend class that subclasses User (and is otherwise empty) is probably the best way to do this.

Actually, if you really wanted to stay within the User class there's a cool trick you can do with overriding objectUsedToPrefixRequest: (see here), but to be honest it'd probably be more trouble than its worth, and I'm not even sure what this would look like for class-level requests.

Of course, as I'm sure you know, you can also nest the friends array when serving the user record to your client.

[pareeohnos]

Cool that sounds reasonable. It makes the code a little clearer as well having separate models I guess. I was trying to avoid nesting the data in the original response, so this way should work perfectly :)

[dingbat]

Awesome, closing. Feel free to reopen if something comes up.