Adding "inverse relationship" computed properties to models

[JHacin]

Hey everyone,

been trying out Payload CMS for the last few days, looking good so far. However, I'm not sure how to approach this requirement I have. Disclaimer: the issue might just be that I'm more used to relational DBs.

Let's say we have 3 models:

USER
_id
email

PRODUCT
_id
sku

ORDER
_id
user_id
product_id

The requirement: whenever I query a User document (whether I query by ID or the entire collection), I would also like to include an orders property, which is an array of references to the orders that the queried User is part of.

Possible solutions that come to mind right now:

• using some sort of collection hook like afterRead in the User config - causes an infinite loop when querying the Order collection unless you use depth: 0 in payload.find()
• using custom API endpoints (would have to maintain at least two separate ones though (GET all + GET by id))
• adding a hidden orders property to User and manually updating it whenever the user_id property changes on any Order document

Am I missing an obvious solution here?

Thanks.

[powerpaul17]

I think there is a join field for that