Formatting of entities and maintaing different entity "versions"

With the introduction of entities in v3, I think there is the potential to solve a problem that I see come up having to do with the consistent formatting/versioning of entities.

I have worked on a couple of projects that involve taking entities and creating different "versions" of the same entity. An example would be something like Foursquare's User Object which has a Mini Object, a Compact Object, and a Complete Object. [https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/responses/user]. After retrieving data, I want to take the entities returned and format them all to the correct type, including the related models; e.g. Photos have their own "versions".

If we were to recreate the Foursquare api in CakePhp, we can use the ORM to give us the correct fields and related data, but then we might still need to do formatting. For instance, Photos will have it's own "versions". This code could live as methods on the models. You could have User->formatMiniObject which then knows to return a stripped down entity. That User Mini Object would also convert the Photo field into a Photo Mini Object instead of a Photo Compact Object. This seems rather messy though.

In 2.x, I currently use Containable to limit my fields but then I have messy, non DRY code that is intersecting the fields I need, and then formatting data for the related models. I think it would be useful to somehow declare these different versions on the entity. You could say that a User Mini Object has id, firstName, lastName, and photo field which is a Photo Mini Object. In the Photo model, I could declare that in order to create a Photo Mini Object, I need to call a method which will use my ImageStorage component to find the URLs. Or Perhaps, it's just a simple entity with id and url directly from the database.

The main scenario where I've encountered this are building APIs with consistent data types which are returned. There might be users objects but due to permissions or privacy a subset of the data is returned to the end user. The API is rigidly defined and so the end user expects certain fields depending on the "version" of the entity returned.

Thoughts?

-- Steve

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