# Reference Expansion

Reference Expansion is a feature of certain endpoints where relationships of a resource are expanded with their attributes, which reduces the amount of requests that need to be sent to the API to retrieve a complete set of data.

It works by appending a list of includes to the query with the type names from the relationships. If an endpoint supports this feature is indicated by the presence of the optional includes parameter.

# Example

To fetch a specific manga with author, artist and cover_art expanded, you can send the following request: GET /manga/f9c33607-9180-4ba6-b85c-e4b5faee7192?includes[]=author&includes[]=artist&includes[]=cover_art. You will now find the objects attributes inside the returned relationships array.

# Note

Your current user needs *.view permission on each type of reference you want to expand. Guests have most of these permissions and for logged-in user accounts you can check GET /auth/check to list all permissions you have been granted. For example, to be able to expand cover_art, you need to have been granted the cover.view permission, for author and artist types you need the author.view permission and so on. If a reference can't be expanded, the request will still succeed and no error indication will be visible.