Re: DbEntity Comments

From: Andrus Adamchik (andru..bjectstyle.org)
Date: Thu Feb 01 2007 - 05:28:54 EST

  • Next message: Aristedes Maniatis: "Re: DbEntity Comments"

    On Jan 31, 2007, at 11:31 PM, Malcolm Edgar wrote:

    > My thinking on design would be to keep it a simple (80/20 rule
    > solution), in which I think a simple comment attribute to the mapping
    > XML elements.

    We can treat comments and properties as two separate features .... or
    not? They share these characteristics though - (a) the data is
    arbitrary and not linked to any Cayenne functions (except for reverse-
    engineering DB comments); (b) they may optionally be excluded from
    runtime; (c) users want both of them :-)

    > In an XML attribute we have to take care encoding the
    > value.

    Just sticking it in a CDATA section should take care of it.

    > With a simple optional attribute, I would think it would be a pretty
    > safe bet that there would not be any performance impact on the initial
    > startup time. I think we are also talking about a trivial amount of
    > memory.

    We are talking about BLOBS of text. Consider people using this for
    javadocs, with each attribute having a 100 char comment field. For
    the model of 50 entities with 20 attributes each, we have (50 +
    50*20) * 100 = 102K. Not crucial, but still keeping this stuff around
    in runtime seems wrong. Those things add up over time, resulting in
    framework becoming heavier with every new release.

    I wouldn't mind storing the data in the main XML file, as the parser
    can skip it in runtime. So how about a simple solution - a single
    parameter passed to Configuration on load that includes or excludes
    optional metadata - no lazy loading hassle, still gives lots of
    flexibility (cgen will include it, runtime will exclude it by default).

    Andrus



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Thu Feb 01 2007 - 05:29:22 EST