Hello,
I'm new to Cayenne but have a strong background with EOF. I
downloaded Cayenne, and found one behavior that I dislike in EOF is
actually somewhat worse (by default) with Cayenne, so I would like to
propose a change to the default behavior.
Imagine a regular one to many relationship Address ->> State.
In EOF, if I create a new Address object and attempt to add a state by
calling the "strongly recommended"
addObjectToBothSidesOfRelationshipWithKey, I will trip a fault and
retrieve every single address in the entire state as a result. In EOF
there are a couple ways around this, all of which are less than ideal.
I can avoid modeling the inverse relationship, but there are many
circumstances where I want this relationship available. I can
directly call address.addState(someState) but if the inverse
relationship is not a fault, the object graph will get out of sync
unnecessarily.
In Cayenne, I don't even appear to have this option. The out of the
box behavior for address.addState(someState) calls the inverse
relationship. This seems to be a wrapper around a method that
resolves to one relationships, with a boolean flag to resolve whether
or not to set the back relationship, but even if I were to override
the default behavior, the result is less than ideal. This is the
behavior I believe to be "correct" for 99% of the applications I have
developed:
1) Look at the inverse relationship, if it is a fault do nothing, if
the user really needed these objects, they would have tripped the
fault.
2) If it is not a fault, do go ahead and add the object to the inverse
relationship.
Note: The only argument I can see against this behavior is if the user
eventually trips the fault before the object is saved to the database.
In practice this is almost never a concern, but if you wanted to be
extra clever, when a fault is actually tripped, you could look at the
inverse relationship to determine if there existed an object that
hadn't yet been saved, and add it at that time.
I have often been called in to troubleshoot performance problems in
WebObjects applications, and the described behavior is often a big
culprit (along with excessive fault tripping generally), as well as
being confusing for new users. I would be curious to hear other
opinions, but my request is to make the out of the box behavior match
above description.
Thanks,
Daniel Abrams
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