Recursive as_array for One-to-many relationships with Kohana 3 ORM - json

Question

To begin with I'd like to say I know how to create ugly solutions for my problem. I am searching good solutions and best practices :)
How do I create deep hierarchial arrays (to json_encode later) from Kohana 3 ORM objects including related objects where the relation type is one-to-many?
The problem is that the ORM->as_array() method does work recursively for the "has one" and "belongs to" relationships but will stop and force you to use ->find_all() manually when you encounter a "has many" relationship.
Say I am creating a JSON API REST server using Kohana 3 and the built in ORM.
When someone looks at this URL: www.example.com/api/user?id=5
They will be served a JSON object for the user where id=5.
These are the orm-models and the relations:
User belongs to a Country
User has many Messages.
Message belongs to a Category
I would like this to work:
echo json_encode(
ORM::factory('user', 5)
->with('country')
->with('messages')
->with('messages:category')
->find()
->as_array()
);
and give me output like this:
{
name: "John"
age: 54,
country_id: 5,
country: {
name: 'Sweden',
code: 'SE'
},
messages: {
{
content: 'Lorem ipsum dolor...',
category_id: 1,
category: {...}
},
{
content: 'Sit amet elit...',
category_id: 2,
category: {...}
},
{
content: 'Consectetur ipsum dolor...',
category_id: 3,
category: {...}
}
}
}
BUT THAT WONT WORK.
This is all you would get:
{
name: "John"
age: 54,
country_id: 5,
country: {
name: 'Sweden',
code: 'SE'
}
}
Has someone forked or extended the Kohana 3 ORM to support this kind functionality?
Does someone know of any good Kohana 3 api module that takes care of this issue for you somehow?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no way to do this using only the ORM. This is the case for two reasons:
If a message has a relation for category, that usually means that category has a corresponding relation for the messages in the category. If you want to get the message "in full" - i.e. including its category - let's say that you also want to get the category "in full" - i.e. including its messages. This is obviously a very bad idea, as you could very easily design yourself into an infinite loop. In other words, if there was a magic "recurse all relations" capability, how would it know when to stop recursing?
All that the ORM is doing behind the scenes when you call find() is building a SQL query that returns a row of data from the database. However, what you are trying to do is too complicated for a single query that returns a single row. (There is a way to retrieve multiple rows as one row with comma-separated values in each field using MySQL's GROUP_CONCAT function, but I guarantee you that it is not worth the trouble.)
For both of these reasons, the ORM's with() method only works on belongs_to (in your case, the user's country and the message's category).
One way to do this query is to break it up into three steps, like this:
// Step 1: Get the user
$user = ORM::factory('user', 5)
->with('country')
->find();
// Step 2: Get the messages
$user->messages
->with('category')
->find_all();
// Step 3: Make user and the messages into arrays.
// User is easy, but messages are a little harder
// because they need to turn
// from "an object containing an array of objects"
// into "an array of arrays."
$user_arr = $user->as_array();
$fixer = function($obj)
{
return $obj->as_array();
};
$user_arr['messages'] = array_map($fixer, $user->messages->as_array());
// Now you can output it
echo json_encode($user_arr);