N-tier development and modeling

Greetings to all,

   It is my hope to draw from the experience and expertise of those among 
you who are more familiar with Modeling than I.

   Here is the situation: my colleagues and I are attempting to put together 
a framework using an N-tier methodology, with the client software 
interfacing to the server/database backend via remote procedure calls (RPC). 
For us, Modeling will serve as a large part of that backend, with an API 
written overtop. The client will make calls to this API, and all will be grand.

   The problem we are having is that of maintaining state between the server 
and the client. For example, if we fetch a set of Person objects to be 
displayed on the client, and then want to perform a delete on one particular 
Person object, how do we know which Person to delete? Modeling seems to work 
wonderfully up to where there is no RPC necessary, but once we add a split 
over the RPC interface, Modeling seems to lack a natural way to refer to 
objects across that divide.

   One thought we had is to set the primary (and foreign?) keys as class 
properties, such that we can refer to them across RPCs. This is somewhat of 
a hybrid of Modeling and the old-fashioned "use the primary key to get what 
we want" method.

   Any thoughts on this matter would be greatly appreciated! Thanks so much 
for your time.

Yours,
   Tom

___________________________________________________________
Tom Hallman                             DiscipleMakers, Inc
[email protected]                 http://www.dm.org/~hallmant
531 Brittany Dr * State College * PA * 16803 * 814-861-4591
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations (Matt 28:19)


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