Hmm really interesting idea, best of both worlds

Maybe with filters but the syntax would be strange ({{ "item.property" | directus }}. Then maybe with async filters it would continue to parse the template. But I am not sure it would and more importantly it would be challenging to to build a model of all the required fields as item would be a variable in a for loop... Am I making sense? Is it even possible ?

The syntax could also be {{ item | directus: "propertyObj.propertyStr" }} but same difficulty to make a ?fields=... out of it ?

Well it might be possible, I should test if we can get a 2 pass filter thanks to async filters
https://www.11ty.dev/docs/filters/#asynchronous-universal-filters

The solutions i see

1. Current solution : download everything, "deeply" enough - hacky inefficient, easy to use in templates
2. The 2 pass idea, figure out what needs to be downloaded out of templates - hacky and potentially inefficient on 11ty's side, easy to use too
3. Define in the plugin config what data should be downloaded, like TinaCMS does (doc), could be linked to directus yaml model, could probably be used in a graphql query directly - efficient and clean, requires to describe content one more time

Maybe solution 1 could also be optimized simply by omitting some useless data, e.g anything which is not a field like the "owner" collection in a m2m or o2m relationship

Solution 1 is probably good enough for a lot of use cases, though number 2 would be ideal (but is way more difficult to build!)

I'll document this in the readme and see what people need then :)

Thank you for your precious input !

Short version:

1. get({"collection":"posts","title":"test","related_pages":[1]}, "related_pages")
2. get item from /relations/ where meta.one_collection == "posts" && meta.one_field == "related_pages" => use meta.many_collection to get the collection posts_page
3. get item from /items/posts_page/ where id == 1 => use meta.junction_field which value is page_id to get "page_id": 3
4. get item from /relations/ where "field": "page_id" && "collection": "posts_page" => use "schema.foreign_key_table": "page" and "schema.foreign_key_column": "id" from schema to get the item from page where id == 18

Is that what I am supposed to do?

That'd be one way, but it would be easier to rely on nesting through the fields parameter or GraphQL if at all possible 🤔 The steps you've described is effectively what the API does internally when using those methods of retrieving nested data 🙂

Interesting that this is how internals work

it would be easier to rely on nesting through the fields parameter or GraphQL

Just to be sure I understand, every time the template does {{ directus.collections.posts[1] | get: "related_pages" }} I need to

1. call the api, e.g. GET /items/posts/2?fields=related_pages.*.* which returns

{
  "data": {
    "related_pages": [
      {
        "id": 1,
        "posts_id": {
          "id": 2,
...same post...
        },
        "page_id": {
...the data I need...
        }
      },
      {
        "id": 2,
        "posts_id": {
          "id": 2,
...same post...
        },
        "page_id": {
...the data I need...
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

3. lookup meta.junction_field from /relations/ to get page_id
4. return data.related_pages array mapped to page_id

Is that right?
It is still pretty complex and involves 1 call for each filter

Hmm I think I'm misunderstanding exactly what you're trying to achieve.. What do you intent to happen when the user does this?:

For simple types one could do {{ directus.collections.posts[0] | get: "title" }}

Thank you @rijkvanzanten for your answer and patience !

Here is another way to put it:

What I want to do is to provide a filter to get an item's related data, e.g {% assign page = item | directus_relation: 'link' %}, with link being a field on item with an alias type. Whatever the type, this filter would return the related item(s)

This filter is just a function getRelation(item, relationshipFieldName)

I did not figure out yet

• a better name for this filter
• how to write this filter
• would it be too much calls from 11ty to directus if a template calls the filter 100s of times

I'll keep you posted as I go, but any pointer is welcome and will be full exploited ! ;)