How to conditional associate related records?

[sokulski]

Coming from Objection on Feathers v4, I was accustomed to specifying what related records I wanted. This avoided circular associations, and reduced the size of requests when I didn't need every related record for a particular record.

I understand in v5 that associations are meant to be done in resolvers. This works great, but I'm hoping to be able to add in a little extra control.

I've noticed that I can return undefined from a virtual property resolver and it isn't included in the response. So I'm looking at adding a query parameter ($expand) that contains an array of the associations I'd like to run.

In each virtual property resolver, I can then conditionally add the associated record(s).

Does this seem like the right track? Am I trying to reinvent something that there's already a "Feathers way" of doing?