Consider allowing access to masked fields from a query clause

[kergoth]

Greetings,

I'm finding cases when creating queries where I'd like to access masked fields. That is, fields which are present in both the item and album, so the album's version is masked by the item's version. So, an item query can't easily access an album field if the field is present in both.

I'm finding myself doing this quite often, actually. For example, my complex path formats using the alternatives plugin to make my library more browsable, I want to be able to relocate items by genre, but take into account if the album has a genre set, to help avoid splitting up albums.

This is actually trivial to work around using the inline plugin, due to the fallback from item to album, e.g.:

album_fields:
  album_id: id

The only downside to this is it imposes a performance hit due to the slow query.

I just figured since we can already do an INNER JOIN to access album fields from an item query, we should be able to access the album fields explicitly (i.e. albums.id). Currently this doesn't work, though, as the join is only done if we're querying a field in model_cls.other_db_fields.

Thoughts?

[kergoth]

Side note: there's no discussions category specifically for development. Maybe worth adding?