Add a "dedata" function to hoist data objects in deserialized objects to the top-level

[Thao-Tran]

This library is almost exactly what my team needs for handling JSON:API data, but one downside is that the deserialized relationships are nested under an extra "data" attribute. I understand from this comment that this is the desired default behaviour, but my team doesn't really need to handle the use case around linked relationships, so it'd be nice if there was a built-in way to flatten these objects a bit.

I was wondering if a new function could be introduced called "dedata" that performs similarly to the "deattribute" function but just hoists the data objects up.

The following is an example of how I'm thinking the function would work:

const response = {
  data: {
    type: 'people',
    id: '1',
    attributes: {
      name: 'Thao'
    },
    relationships: {
      coworkers: {
        data: [
          {
            type: 'people',
            id: '2'
          },
          {
            type: 'people',
            id: '3'
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  },
  included: [
    {
      type: 'people',
      id: '2',
      attributes: {
        name: 'Anthony'
      }
    },
    {
      type: 'people',
      id: '3',
      attributes: {
        name: 'Dave'
      }
    }
  ]
}

const deserializedData = deserialize(response)
// {
//   data: {
//     type: 'people',
//     id: '1',
//     name: 'Thao',
//     coworkers: {
//       data: [
//         {
//           type: 'people',
//           id: '2',
//           name: 'Anthony'
//         },
//         {
//           type: 'people',
//           id: '3',
//           name: 'Dave'
//         }
//       ]
//     }
//   }
// }

const data = dedata(deserializedData)
// {
//   type: 'people',
//   id: '1',
//   name: 'Thao',
//   coworkers: [
//     {
//       type: 'people',
//       id: '2',
//       name: 'Anthony'
//     },
//     {
//       type: 'people',
//       id: '3',
//       name: 'Dave'
//     }
//   ]
// }

I'd be happy to implement the changes for this as well!

[wopian]

Thank you for your interest in this library! I can take a look at adding this functionality 😃

Would a hoistData option added to the deserialise method be prefered for you? I.e deserialise(input, { hoistData: true })

If you are using this through the Axios library (kitsu), this would be passed through new Kitsu({ hoistData: true })

[Thao-Tran]

Oh nice, yeah a hoistData option for the deserialise method would be great. Thank you!

[wopian]

I have added this to kitsu-core@11.1.0 and kitsu@11.1.0: https://github.com/wopian/kitsu/releases/tag/v11.1.0

There is a small performance overhead when hoisting out of data, for the test case I used for the unit tests, not hoisting the data takes 0.11ms on average on Node 24. Hoisting the data takes 0.19ms on average, aproximately double the execution time.

[wopian]

Docs can be found:

• kitsu: https://github.com/wopian/kitsu/blob/v11.1.0/packages/kitsu/README.md#parameters
• kitsu-core: https://github.com/wopian/kitsu/tree/v11.1.0/packages/kitsu-core#deserialise

If you have attributes that conflict with JSON:API properties, the preference is:

1. Merge data, links and meta into parent node
2. If attributes.links or attributes.meta exist, they will override the JSON:API links and meta objects when hoisData is enabled.

[Thao-Tran]

Just tested and it works perfectly, thank you so much for the quick action!