What was the challenge with circular relationships? I work on an offline-first system and all inter-object relationships are managed by GUIDs, so cyclical references don't present any problems - objects are sent and received as one big list keyed by guids, not as a tree.
"objects are sent and received as one big list keyed by guids, not as a tree"
That's an interesting pattern I've not heard of before - any links you could recommend for more details on it? It sounds really useful for moderate sized data sets.
I remember coming across it fairly heavily in react/redux stuff, mostly because it makes dealing with redux's stores a lot simpler if you avoid nested structures like that.
There's a library called normalizr[1], whose purpose is to take nested API responses and turn them into flat structures. Have an article[2] about it.
