How to make availableIncludes work in thephpleague/fractal

Question

I'm having trouble implementing Fractal includes. I am trying to include posts with a particular user.

All goes well when I add 'posts' to $defaultIncludes at the top of my UserItemTransformer. Posts are included as expected. However, posts are NOT included in my json output when I change $defaultIncludes to $availableIncludes, even after calling $fractal->parseIncludes('posts');

The problem seems to lie the fact that the method that includes the posts is only called when I use $defaultIncludes. it is never called when I use $availableIncludes.

I'm probably missing something obvious here. Can you help me find out what it is?

This works:

// [...] Class UserItemTransformer
protected $defaultIncludes = [
    'posts'
];

This does not work:

// [...] Class UserItemTransformer
protected $availableIncludes = [
    'posts'
];

// [...] Class PostsController
// $fractal is injected in the method (Laravel 5 style)
$fractal->parseIncludes('posts');

Answer 1

Got it!

When I called parseIncludes('posts'), this was on a new Fractal instance, injected into the controller method. Of course I should have called parseIncludes() on the Fractal instance that that did the actual parsing (and that I injected somewhere else, into an Api class).

public function postsWithUser($user_id, Manager $fractal, UserRepositoryInterface $userRepository)
{
    $api = new \App\Services\Api();
    $user = $userRepository->findById($user_id);
    if ( ! $user) {
        return $api->errorNotFound();
    }

    $params = [
        'offset' => $api->getOffset(),
        'limit'  => $api->getLimit()
    ];
    $user->posts = $this->postRepository->findWithUser($user_id, $params);

    // It used to be this, using $fractal, that I injected as method parameter
    // I can now also remove the injected Manager $fractal from this method
    // $fractal->parseIncludes('posts');

    // I created a new getFractal() method on my Api class, that gives me the proper Fractal instance
    $api->getFractal()->parseIncludes('posts');
    return $api->respondWithItem($user, new UserItemTransformer());
}

I'll just go sit in a corner and be really quit for a while, now.