Sequelize query shows additional data in Many to Many relationship

Question

I have this setup, a many-to-many relationship between Users and Topics:

User.belongsToMany(Topic, {through: "UserTopics", timestamps: false});
Topic.belongsToMany(User, {through: "UserTopics", timestamps: false});

I try to get all the users and their topics, this query does it pretty well:

User.findAll({
    attributes: { exclude: ["password"] },
    include: [
      { model: Topic, attributes: ['id', 'name',] }
    ]
  })

This is what it outputs:

[
    {
        "id": 1,
        "firstName": "John",
        "lastName": "Doe",
        "CNP": "123",
        "email": "john@gmail.com",
        "validated": false,
        "createdAt": "2021-02-15T21:46:52.000Z",
        "updatedAt": "2021-02-15T21:46:52.000Z",
        "topics": [
            {
                "id": 1,
                "name": "crypto",
                "UserTopics": {
                    "userId": 1,
                    "topicId": 1
                }
            },
         ...
     },
     ...
]

But the problem that I have and I just can't figure why it happens is that UserTopics attribute that shows up for every topic a user has.

How do I get rid of it?

Answer 1

Read this https://sequelize.org/master/manual/advanced-many-to-many.html

If you want to exclude assosiation fields from result:

User.findAll({
    attributes: { exclude: ["password"] },
    include: [
      { model: Topic, attributes: ['id', 'name',] }
    ],
    through: {
      attributes: []
    }
})

Answer 2

Thanks fatur for pointing out the page. The actual way to do this is a little bit different than what he wrote. The "through" attribute must be inside the array object, like this:

User.findAll({
    attributes: { exclude: ["password"] },
    include: [
        {
            model: Topic,
            attributes: ["id", "name"],
            through: {
                attributes: []
            }
        }
    ]
})