How to skip a level in a multi-level relationship about yin

[kocsismate]

The spec says the following in the "Inclusion of Related Resources" section:

Note: Because compound documents require full linkage (except when relationship linkage is excluded by sparse fieldsets), intermediate resources in a multi-part path must be returned along with the leaf nodes. For example, a response to a request for comments.author should include comments as well as the author of each of those comments.

So the current behaviour is a requirement of the spec.

But the next paragraph states the following:

Note: A server may choose to expose a deeply nested relationship such as comments.author as a direct relationship with an alias such as comment-authors. This would allow a client to request /articles/1?include=comment-authors instead of /articles/1?include=comments.author. By abstracting the nested relationship with an alias, the server can still provide full linkage in compound documents without including potentially unwanted intermediate resources.

So skipping a relationship level is only an additional functionality servers can provide. Some months ago, I tried to implement it, but it proved to be really complex. Anyway, I'll have a look at it again if I can find an efficient solution to the problem.

[mmucklo]

Ok thanks for clarifying - I suppose the best solution might be to do
sparse fieldsets on the intermediate resources then...

[kocsismate]

This idea is really good indeed until the feature is implemented.

[kocsismate]

I'll close this as it is too complex to develop and the gain is not so much.