Return join table attributes in incluce with loopback - loopbackjs

Question

I've got a data structure fairly similar to the one described on the Loopback HasManyThrough documentation page.
For a given Physician (e.g. id 2), I would like to get all their patients with an appointment AND their appointment date.
I can do a GET operation like this:
GET /physicians/2
with the filter header { "include" : {"relation":"patients"} }
And I do get the physician, and the list of patients, but I lose the appointmentDate of the relation.
Or, I can do a GET operation on the relation table like the documentation shows:
GET /appointments
with the filter header { "include" : {"relation":"patient"}, "where":{"physicianId":2}} }
And I get the the appointments, with the date and the patient embedded, but not the physician details.
I can't seem to be able to combine the two.
Is there a way to get the whole data with one query?
The data would be something like this:
[
"name" : "Dr John",
"appointments" : [ {
"appointmentDate": "2014-06-01",
"patient": {
"name": "Jane Smith",
"id": 1
}
}]
]
One way hack I found is to define the relation twice. Once as a HasManyThrough and once as a HasMany to the appointments table, then I can do something like this:
GET /physicians/2
with the filter header { "include" : {"relation":"appointments","scope":{"include":["patient"]} } }
But that doesn't seem right, or could maybe lead to odd behaviours with the duplicated relation.. but maybe I'm paranoid.

Answer 1

You could include both models
GET /appointments
{ "include": ["patient", "physician"], "where": { "physicianId":2 } }
You will get quite a lot of duplicate data though (details of physician with id 2). I believe, that HasManyThrough relation model was initially not supposed to carry any extra data and therefore, it has some limitations. Here is a related github issue.