How can I return only user.profile.rating.content without getting the full profile and rating objects?

[shoodoow]

I’m on Payload v3.49 (MongoDB) and trying to fetch only specific deeply nested fields without over-fetching.
🔗 My setup

User → has profile (relationship)

Profile → has rating (relationship)

📄 Query I’m running

const res = await payload.find({
  collection: 'users',
  where: { email: { equals: '[email protected]' } },
  select: { profile: true },
  populate: {
    profile: {
      rating: { content: true }
    }
  },
  depth: 3,
});

✅ What I expect

Only the content field from the rating, nested inside profile:

{
  "profile": {
    "rating": {
      "content": "Great coach!"
    }
  }
}

❌ What I actually get (simplified)

{
  "profile": {
    "id": "abc123",
    "createdAt": "...",
    "updatedAt": "...",
    "fullName": "John Doe",
    "country": "Estonia",
    "rating": {
      "id": "xyz456",
      "createdAt": "...",
      "updatedAt": "...",
      "content": "Great coach!",
      "extraField1": "...",
      "extraField2": "..."
    }
  }
}

🤔 Questions

Is there a way to only return user.profile.rating.content (and avoid hydrating the rest of the profile and rating objects)?

Right now it seems:

    ❌ The profile object itself is never trimmed — I always get all profile fields (fullName, age, etc.).

Is this by design (relationship hydration always includes the entire doc)?

[matthijs166]

From a quick look, I don't think you can make the rating relationship inside profile populate recursively in the way you're expecting.

Instead, you want to:

• Populate profile.rating by setting rating: true inside the profile populate object.
• Then separately populate rating.content via the top-level populate.

What I think happens now:

• Populate profile.rating is set with an invalid value and is skipped
• Populate rating is not set and also fully returned

Try something like this:

const res = await payload.find({
  collection: 'users',
  where: { email: { equals: '[email protected]' } },
  select: { profile: true },
  populate: {
    profile: {
      rating: true
    },
    rating: {
       content: true
    },
  },
  depth: 3,
});

Are you using typescript? Think that this normally would give a type error.

[shoodoow]

Thanks so much for your help, @matthijs166