Re: 4.1 templates with relationships

> Am 17.07.2018 um 19:12 schrieb Andrus Adamchik <[email protected]>:
> 
>> I'm experimenting with 4.1 and field-based DataObjects. I noticed, using the standard 4.1 server superclass template, that the fields that cover relationships aren't narrowly typed but are simply specified as Object, which is apparently necessary because they may get populated with a ToOneFault or a ToManyFault. Is there really no way to get these types more specific?
> 
> I guess an alternative way is to create pairs of typed fields ("T related", "ToOneFault relatedFault"). This will have memory overhead though. IIRC 8 bytes per object per relationship on a 64-bit architecture, i.e. not that small, considering how may objects one might keep in memory. So our performance improvement benchmarks vs 4.0 won't look as impressive :) 

Indeed. Not really an option for me in general. Pity.

>> I also noticed that the template specifies the field scope as protected. Isn't that unnecessarily broad? 
> 
> I suspect since getters are doing extra work, it was decided to expose bare ivars to allow subclasses to manipulate them directly. Having said that, there's always "readPropertyDirectly(..)" and "writePropertyDirectly(..)" to access those fields in any special yet-unforeseen cases. So I wouldn't mind if we make the ivars private in the future releases.

Did anyone manipulate the hashmaps directly with good reason before we had the field-based implementation?

> BTW, with your Gson serialization, how do you deal with controlled serialization of essentially infinite graphs? Do you provide a spec of how deep to go down the relationships path?

I don't have that problem in my experimentation project because I can use an ExclusionStrategy there that solves it. If actual cyclic references need to be expressed, I guess that would be a custom solution with semantics encoded in JSON that the consumer on the other end would need to know about. But I'm not trying to serialize my entire database to someone :)

Maik