Are Bi-Directional Relationships on the Roadmap?

[benjamin-p-newton]

Hi guys,

Just wondering when/if bi-directional relationships are on the roadmap for the near future?
I consider it a fundamental feature that should be prioritized and the lack of this feature is preventing me from migrating a number of projects to Payload.

Regards,

[jmikrut]

Hey man,

Yes! We talked about them for about an hour today in the office. We will get this more formally announced soon, but this is definitely a high priority for us. Do you mind sharing any information about your use case? It would be good to know so that we can plan accordingly!

[benjamin-p-newton]

In simple terms, they're SaaS applications that we've developed using Strapi to handle the data/access layer with a NextJs front end. The applications require a relational database with a data model that hosts a large number of 1-n and n-n relationships, and requires a high-level of data integrity. The relationships require querying from either side frequently from the front-end application via rest apis.

We originally chose Strapi as it originally best met the self-hosted, customisable, relationship feature set and TypeScript requirements. However, Strapi has proven difficult to customise as the it's native code is somewhat difficult to decipher in some cases, can be buggy, has inconsistent data response formats through the layers (rest api, internal services, through to the direct database apis) and is fundamentally a JavaScript project with TypeScript slapped on the top, which provides a poor development experience.

We're really impressed with Payload and believe it resolves all the issues listed above and introduces some very nice features of it's own (particularly from a development experience point of view). The only thing that's remaining is a feature equivalent to Strapi's Bi-Directional Relationship feature as it's very helpful from a development experience point of view as it makes maintaining and querying relationship data very simple.

Hope that provides the additional insight you were chasing.

Thanks.

[w41x]

I created a prototype for a plugin. Check it out:

https://github.com/w41x/payload-bidirectional-relationships-plugin