Backend API: Expanding

Expanding allows you to include related records as defined by link or collection fields. For example, in the cart model, items are linked to a product with the product field which means they aren't automatically included in the result when retrieving a cart. Since the item product is nested in a list of objects, you would use dot-notation to specify the path to the expandable field.

When the expandable field refers to many records, you may want to specify a limit to include more than the default limit, which is 5. To do that for example, use the format variants:50 with the field name and limit separated by :.

When retrieving a list of results, expand will be performed on all records in the result set.

Expand paths can be at most 5 levels deep—deeper queries return an error.

Example query using expand

const { swell } = require('swell-node');
swell.init('store-id', 'secret-key');

await swell.get('/carts/{id}', {
  id: '5407e0929fe97f9d4c712a5e',
  expand: [
    'items.product',
    'items.variant',
  ],
});

Response

{
  "id": "5407e0929fe97f9d4c712a5e",
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "5407e0929fe97f9d4c712a5f",
      "product_id": "5407e0929fe97f9d4c712a5g",
      "product": {
        "name": "Example product",
        ...
      }
    },
    {...}
  ],
  ...
}