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Rex Mottram wrote:
> I know that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" but OTOH
> there are situations where you want to think about future needs before
> putting hands to keyboard .... I'm building a web app which currently
> has no persist store. There is, however, a plan to retrofit a
> persistence framework of the JPA/Hibernate sort eventually, and I'm
> wondering if circular object references are going to be a problem when
> that time comes.
>
> In other words I've got code now where a Barrel contains a collection of
> Monkeys, and each Monkey contains a reference back to its containing
> Barrel, so that the Barrel class can have (say) a getMonkeyIterator()
> method and the Monkey class can have a getBarrel().

This is absolutely normal and works fine with JPA.

Mark Thornton

Mark Thornton wrote:
> Rex Mottram wrote:
>> I know that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" but OTOH
>> there are situations where you want to think about future needs before
>> putting hands to keyboard .... I'm building a web app which currently
>> has no persist store. There is, however, a plan to retrofit a
>> persistence framework of the JPA/Hibernate sort eventually, and I'm
>> wondering if circular object references are going to be a problem when
>> that time comes.
>>
>> In other words I've got code now where a Barrel contains a collection
>> of Monkeys, and each Monkey contains a reference back to its
>> containing Barrel, so that the Barrel class can have (say) a
>> getMonkeyIterator() method and the Monkey class can have a getBarrel().
>
> This is absolutely normal and works fine with JPA.
>
> Mark Thornton
>
In particular for JPA and Hibernate using annotations, you have a
@OneToMany(targetEntity=Monkey.class) Set<Monkey> monkeys; in the
Barrel, and a @ManyToOne Barrel barrel; in the Monkey class.

What's important to remember in Relational theory is that ALL relations
include two endpoints, whether you model that explicitly or not.
--
Daniel Pitts' Tech Blog: <http://virtualinfinity.net/wordpress/>

Lew wrote:
> Daniel Pitts wrote:
>> In particular for JPA and Hibernate using annotations, you have a
>> @OneToMany(targetEntity=Monkey.class) Set<Monkey> monkeys; in the
>> Barrel, and a @ManyToOne Barrel barrel; in the Monkey class.
>>
>> What's important to remember in Relational theory is that ALL
>> relations include two endpoints, whether you model that explicitly or
>> not.
>
> I have trouble remembering who "owns" the relation, so that the other
> one can say "mappedBy" in its annotation. Monkey owns the Monkey-Barrel
> connection, right? Something like
>
> @OneToMany( targetEntity=Monkey.class, mappedBy="barrel" )
> Set <Monkey> monkeys;
> ?
>
You *can* do that (and often it makes sense). I believe there is also a
way to have a third table that is just for the relation, something like
Monkey_Barrel (id, Monkey_Id, Barrel_id). Which might make more sense
if semantically neither monkey nor barrel should "own" the reference.
Ofcourse, this does have performance implications :-p

--
Daniel Pitts' Tech Blog: <http://virtualinfinity.net/wordpress/>