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Subject: Re: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys
Hi Brian, Your constrained use of keys sounds really good to me, but I'm wondering how that could be controlled. If we specify key projection in the project() method, how do we limit where it will be used? Are we just talking about how we advertise it? Frank Bryan Aupperle <aupperle@us.ibm.com> 10/07/2008 02:04 PM To sdo@lists.oasis-open.org cc Subject Re: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Binding is a very overloaded term these days. From the SCA view, right now a binding is effectively a transport protocol and its associated headers. SCA has also identified the need to be able to describe the conversion between the format of data on the wire (which is strongly influenced by the binding) and the format needed by a component implementation (this is sometime called a data binding). Independent of all of this are interface definitions and SCA is not addressing the specifics of complex data types, deferring to things like SDO or JAXB. Having said that, I view the role of SDO as a storage and technology independent way of representing data in memory and as a way for different implementation technologies to access the same data structure. The project idea we adopted in issue 66 is very consistent with this view since cooperating local services are very likely to be developed at different time and with compatible but independent definitions of the data model. Adding keys to this in a constrained manner makes sense. The constraint is that like any other projection, it happens explicitly within a service, i.e. a service projects between the type used in the interface and the type used internally. It makes sense because there are clearly cases where you want to share an object that references other objects, but not share the referenced objects explicitly. Using the course registration example, the main registration service may want to share course enrollment information with another service, but that other should not have access to full student data - it could access data for a specific student via a request to the DAS (providing proper credentials). So the main service would project from the full representation to a representation using keys before providing an object over a service interface. This keeps us away from SDO being used for interface compatibility or implicit mapping over an SCA wire. Of course if the main service only exposes the fully inflated set of objects, then an ESB transformation would be added to do the explicit mapping using the two separate SDO type definitions. Bryan Aupperle, Ph.D. STSM, WebSphere Enterprise Platform Software Solution Architect Research Triangle Park, NC +1 919-254-7508 (T/L 444-7508) Internet Address: aupperle@us.ibm.com Blaise Doughan <blaise.doughan@oracle.com> 10/07/2008 11:40 AM To "Barack, Ron" <ron.barack@sap.com> cc radu.preotiuc-pietro@oracle.com, Frank Budinsky <frankb@ca.ibm.com>, sdo@lists.oasis-open.org Subject Re: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi Ron, Frank, Radu, and All, Below are a couple of use cases I have to express my opinions. Use Case #1 - SOA Message Compatibility Beyond Identical WSDLs This is a very compelling use case. Speaking as someone who represents a SOA binding product (EclipseLink MOXy), this could make service development easier, reducing the amount of transformation necessary to link services. However I would rather not have this issue addressed as part of the SDO spec. I would suggest having a separate binding spec. In this way SDO and JAXB perspectives on the topic could both be represented, instead of trying to give all this responsibility to SDO. Also Frank mentions that additional mapping functionality is required as soon as different names are used for properties, the addition of a new spec could be expanded to handle these scenarios. Use Case #2 - Projection and Keys and Undefined States Assume in this scenario SDO is being used to deal with a persistent data store such as a large database. The data model is very connected with no containment relationships and the SDO type model has been designed accordingly. Working in a SOA I want to respond to queries with messages, that are pruned down versions of the data. To implement this I could use the "projection and keys" approach. Wrt projection we have said a data object is in an undefined state until the data is projected back. Ideally I could carve off many pruned messages to respond to service requests without waiting for the previous request to respond (if it ever does), but it is not clear this can be done (am I allowed to project an object that is already in an undefined state?). Obviously there are mechanisms that could be put in place such as optimistic locking to ensure that the changes made by multiple projections are compatible, but here I agree with Radu that this aspect of projection and keys feels like a DAS responsibility. -Blaise Barack, Ron wrote: Hi, Each company of course has its own perspective on what SDO 3 should be, and I hope everyone will speak out at today's meeting. I just want to point out that it is not a choice between DAS oriented and SOA oriented architectures - these two functionalities are very much complimentary to each other. In a SOA architecture, the data has to come from somewhere, and there is even more reason that usual to for client not to care about the technology of the datasource: DAS's fit very well into a SOA. Conversely, DAS technology becomes even more important when there are more consumers of the data: SOA expands the client base for DAS's. We already resolved to support the project method, at the F2F as a concept, and then in the resolution to SDO-66. To me, that means SDO is in the business of moving data between contexts, therefore, we are already in the business of specifying the rules about when this is possible. All this proposal adds to the picture is the question of whether or not the data must always be the transitive closure, the reachability graph, or whether SDO will allow is to "prune" the graph. I would argue that such pruning is a necessary part of moving data between object oriented and document oriented technologies. And that is central to the SOA and the SDO stories. Guess Obama and McCain won't be the only debate today. Best Regards, Ron -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Radu Preotiuc-Pietro [mailto:radu.preotiuc-pietro@oracle.com] Gesendet: Dienstag, 7. Oktober 2008 04:19 An: Barack, Ron; Frank Budinsky; sdo@lists.oasis-open.org Betreff: RE: AW: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi Frank, Ron, First, I can confirm what Frank said about me worrying about the "multiple incompatible views" scenario. If you do have a universe which can be represented conceptually as a set of interconnected Java interfaces and you want to "slice" it into "views", then the solution presented works, even though it feels like DAS-level functionality to generate the data graphs. If your universe is anything else, then the solution doesn't work because it requires extra mapping, which is why I think in last week's call, none of the participant companies indicated that this was a feature that they would actually make use of. I also have given some thought to Ron's closing comment that passing off a "projected" or live copy of a DataObject to another data service is like a pass-by-reference of data; in fact, the idea of a change summary that gets passed between DAS and client and which records changes is like an "optimistic", loosely coupled pass-by-reference. And if the contract between two DASes is WSDL and Schema-driven, SDO's XML serialization mechanisms (which need to be better specified by the way, to ensure change summary interoperability between vendors) fit perfectly as a conceptual model. Everybody understands that if the two services are co-located, ample optimization is possible, but from a conceptual point of view, SDO already fits the bill. I agree that access to the same data by different technologies (like POJOs without containment and JAXBs with containment) is an interesting problem, but aren't we actually starting to talk about modifying the data now for different users? That's the slippery slope of going down the route of mapping. The other slippery slope is to move to a "connected" model for SDO where calling a set to an SDO object backed by a JPA object might trigger an update right then and there, before getting the chance to complete the modifications. I think we are taking a bit of risk of promoting SDO for a use-case it might not be well-suited for, thus eroding its credibility, and that's a worry for me. Especially since the proposal does not seem to fit most companies' use cases for SDO, as evidenced by the fact that it doesn't have enthusiastic support from at least one other member. As much as I hate having to disagree with Ron on this issue that he worked so dilligently on and made such good jo b of presenting, I do disagree that this is a problem that SDO needs to solve. Thanks, Radu -----Original Message----- From: Barack, Ron [mailto:ron.barack@sap.com] Sent: Monday, October 06, 2008 4:35 PM To: Frank Budinsky; sdo@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: AW: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi Everyone, The question Frank poses is whether or not the project operation is simply an optimized copy operation, adding convenience and perhaps reusing memory, sort of an optimized CopyHelper. I could argue that this optimization would be difficult for someone outside of the SDO implementation to provide, but I think there's a more important misunderstanding here. Forget, for a moment, the implementation. What's most important here is what we are defining. SDO projection *defines* the when 2 types are compatible. This is a central problem when building any SOA. Imagine a service that exposes Customer getCustomer(); Under what circumstances does this match a WSDL with XSD <complexType name="Customer"/> Does it match only when JAXB says it would, namely, when the structure of the Customer object match the containment structure of the XSD type. Are we going to impose the clients containment structure on our service's data model? Or are we going to allow a looser definition, one that will allow the data representations to differ in some ways. Projection, the definition of projection, is intended to bring us to the point where SDO type compatibility will give the SOA world this definition. In order for SOA to work, especially in the case of SCA, but also SOA generally, one of the main points is defining "compatibility of interfaces". Right now, standard SOA declares that the WSDLs have to match (BTW, it's not clear exactly what this means). SCA allows different interfaces to be used on the client and server side of the wire, but the argument types must match exactly. This is a major obsticle...actually, I always felt that data representation is the first of the SOA problems that needs solving, and that the SCA groups really needed to address this first, not last, but that's another rant. The point is, SDO is the spec I know of that is looking at data from a SOA perspective. It's fallen to us to solve this problem, and in fact, SDO, as a technology neutral data representation is uniquely positioned to actually solve it well. And of course, SDO will not only define projection, but implementations will provide it. So SDO becomes an important part of SOA infrastructure, providing the functionality to move data between representations. One of the most important ways that data representations differ is the containment structure. I've written somewhere on this thread that the proposed projection of keys is a fundamental part of moving data from document to object based representations. Obviously, in this functionality, we are not talking about an arbitrary client calling an arbitrary service, with absolutely no agreement on how the data is represented. That's a problem you can only solve with some kind of mapping framework. What we are defining are the cases where mapping will not be necessary (and avoiding mapping has major benefits). Getting two types to match closely enough that they will be projectable is not something I suppose will happen by accident. I imagine either the XSD or the object model will come first, and one will be derived from the other. We can't do magic, and we can't replace a mapping framework. We *can* allow all components to use a data representation that is natural to their technology, and we *can* provide very efficient communication between them. And that's not a small thing. Best Regards, Ron ________________________________ Von: Frank Budinsky [mailto:frankb@ca.ibm.com] Gesendet: Mo 06.10.2008 22:56 An: sdo@lists.oasis-open.org Betreff: Re: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi guys, Given that the discussion of this topic consumed almost all of the previous call, I was hoping to see some email discussion. Given the lack of input, let me summarize my own thoughts and where I think last weeks discussion left off. One thing that is still not clear to me is how would one implement Ron's scenario if we didn't allow key projection? I think the answer is that it would need to be done by the SCA binding that would manage the keys and do a mapping/translation step (copying objects). If that's true, then having project() do it is really just an optimization (no copy), as opposed to a critical function (not that I don't personally think it would be a good thing regardless). The second question is, how convinced are we that this function will be usable in a typical scenario. Isn't it possible that the different "views" will usually be incompatible anyway (different naming, for example), so some higher level way of mapping the views (e.g., in an SCA binding) will often be needed anyway? I think these are the kinds of things that Radu was also getting at. I was hoping that Ron could answer these questions, after which we'd all understand exactly what key projection is good for and what it isn't good for. Thanks, Frank. Frank Budinsky/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA 09/19/2008 06:21 PM To sdo@lists.oasis-open.org cc Subject Re: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi guys, I think I agree with Ron, that it is important to spec out the behavior when projecting between keys and entities, but I also think that this may be an easier sell if all SDO implementations were not required to support it. I think it's a good example of something that should be an optional compliance point, since it may involve a lot of work to handle scenarios that some implementations may not be interested in supporting. That said, I think Ron's proposal for how key projection works (if supported) is good. If an implementation doesn't support key projection, I would say that it should throw UnsupportedOperationException (or maybe InvalidArgumentException) when called with arguments that have key types, rather than do something that simply ignores the key metadata. Otherwise, as Ron mentioned, there could be two incompatible (non error) behaviors that are both considered compliant. Frank. "Barack, Ron" <ron.barack@sap.com> 09/10/2008 04:20 AM To <sdo@lists.oasis-open.org> cc Subject AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi Everyone, As suggesting in yesterday's meeting, I'm sending out some mails, refereshing everyone's mind on the state of these discussions. There was actually some discussion of 119 during the call on Sept. 2, and maybe it is a good idea to have the discussion reflected in an email thread, so I will repeat it here. There question was (from Blaise on behaf of Radu), why we need to specify this behavior, why can't it be left as a vendor extension? After all, the resolution to SDO-66 defined strict compatibility rules, but allowed implementations to weaken them. Can't the compatibility between keys and entities be allowed under this clause, without requiring vendors to implement this behaviour? I would argue the answer is "no", and I'll give 2 reasons. First of all, the proposal includes more than just the rule that entities are compatible with their key types, there is a certain amount of behavior that goes along with it, eg, changes to the values of keys do not change the value of the key field in the underlying entity, but change the target of there reference. It's difficult to imagine that this behaviour would be "compatible" to the behavior of an implementation that did not support projection between keys and entities. The second reason is that this behavior is necessary for projection to achieve its primary goal, allowing different containment structures to be imposed on object oriented models. For instance, consider the m:n relationship between students and courses in the example. When generating the XML, we want to produce a document in which Student contains (a reference to) Course. The projection works exactly because of the special behavior associated with keys. If Student contained the entity "Course", then we'd get an illegal graph, because each "Course" would have multiple containers. Moving data between object-oriented and document-oriented applications, for instance, between JEE and BPEL, is perhaps *the* central problem we are looking at SDO 3 to solve. Achieving this goal requires that the proposal (or one like it) be accepted. As such, the proposal is too important to be left as a vendor extension. Ron Von: Barack, Ron [mailto:ron.barack@sap.com] Gesendet: Dienstag, 26. August 2008 11:21 An: sdo@lists.oasis-open.org Betreff: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi Everyone, Moving a discussion from another thread to this thread, for clarity, and so we can remember the issues: Blaise asked: * What is the impact of relaxing the SDO name uniqueness requirement on projection? * What is the impact of SDO-82 on projection? Right now, the projection algorithm matches by name only. It could be that we need to make this a little more precise when considering that property names may not necessarily be unique, and type names (in the case of XSD anonymous types) may not even be defined. It's also possible that we can say that projection, like static SDO generation, has some additional constraints, such as name uniqueness These are all valid questions to consider, but what exactly is the relationship with the proposal being discussed here? Does having the compatibility rule regarding keys and entities make the above issues any worse or better? * Is SDO-119 useful without an identity concept? Currently my thinking is that identity management is required here. There actually is some identity management within the proposal, the scope in which the identity is meaningful is the graph being projected. SDO doesn't have any sense of a scope that is smaller than the HelperContext yet bigger than a DataGraph. Other frameworks, notably JPA and similar persistence frameworks, do. For example, in JPA, you have the users persistence context, in which the scope of the mapping between objects and identity can be managed on a per-thread basis. In SDO, however, the next larger scope for the identity is the context, and I think we agree that the context can shared between threads, at the enterprise application level. It could be that we need to add something like a persistence context to SDO, but I've been trying to avoid this, and instead to allow the user to inject his own flavor of entity management by specifying an EntityResolver... please see my emails to Bryan in this thread, and my earlier proposals in SDO-125. The current proposal regarding keys and projection is meant to define a default behavior and a baseline on which the future EntityResolver functionality can be built. Would you be more willing to resolve this issue if I added the EntityResolver back in? * Alignment with SDO-135. I believe the spirit of SDO-119 & projection in general is to enable alignment with other standards. I believe these issues should be worked on in parallel, for example the Binder proposal could be enhanced to unify SDO-135 and projection. There were some proposals in this direction, which we moved away from based on your previous wish that the functionalities be separated. For the earlier discussion, please see http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/sdo/email/archive s/200808/msg00001.html http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/sdo/email/archive s/200807/msg00034.html The question where I was hanging is whether or not Binder is allowed to wrap the POJO or DOM structure, or must copy involve a copy step. Up to now, we've always though of projection as not requiring a copy step. If we want to bring the concepts together then we must either say Binder allows wrapping, or Projection does not allow wrapping. I'd be willing to further pursue these proposals, but I need some guidence from the TC as to which direction is appropriate. I actually started work on this proposal in 119 once I had the impression that we had a better chance of making progress by separating Binding and Projection. Now the opposite opinion is being expressed. I usually do not propose something without first prototyping, so that it is a significant effort to make a proposal. It is difficult to make progress without stakes in the ground, such as this one, that provide foundations upon which futher proposals can be based. That said, opinions on wrapping/ copying are more than welcome (but in the appropriate thead, please) Ron Von: Bryan Aupperle [mailto:aupperle@us.ibm.com] Gesendet: Freitag, 15. August 2008 17:40 An: sdo@lists.oasis-open.org Betreff: Re: AW: AW: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys I would be happy to address it separately since I think it opens some interesting questions that have DAS implications, (Questions like: Does SDO know what DAS is associated any given type? Does SDO retrieve entities from the DAS directly, or is that the responsibility of client code? ) Perhaps the best way to handle it would be to make sure we open a separate issue as we resolve this one. Bryan Aupperle, Ph.D. STSM, WebSphere Enterprise Platform Software Solution Architect Master Inventor Research Triangle Park, NC +1 919-254-7508 (T/L 444-7508) Internet Address: aupperle@us.ibm.com "Barack, Ron" <ron.barack@sap.com> 08/15/2008 11:05 AM To Bryan Aupperle/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS, <sdo@lists.oasis-open.org> cc Subject AW: AW: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi Bryan, In th current proposal, the implementation would create one entity for each distinct key value. The entity would have all default values, except for the key properties, which would of course match the key. In earlier versions of the proposal, I defined a second projection method that took a second argument. I called this argument an "EntityResolver" and the idea was exactly to allow the client (probably in this case a DAS) to provide some special logic to manage the reference objects. In the SAP prototype, for instance, we have an implementation that basically wraps a JPA EntityManager. This is certainly something I want to address before we go final, but I don't think we necessarily have to define it as part of this issue. It seems to me that the current proposal is clear enough that it can be accepted as is...we've been unable to make progress on this proposal for weeks now, and I thought it might go easier if we added things piece by piece. One of the things holding me back from making a proposal with an EntityManager is that even though I think the functionality is clear and clearly needed, I'm not sure about how the API should look. Specifically, depending on how ISSUE 134 is resolved, we may get some kind of "Projector" object, which would be a much better place it parameterize projection...with an entity manager, or anything else. I'm not very enthusiastic about having a second "project" method. It also sort of disturbed me in our implementation that the application would get back a graph in which the entities at the edges were attached, but the real SDO content was still detached. It might be better to allow other hooks into the projection process, eg, one for normal objects, so that the implementation can call "merge" or something. It seems you agree we need an EntityResolver, do you need to see it as part of the resolution of this issue, or do you think we can solve it seperately? Ron Von: Bryan Aupperle [mailto:aupperle@us.ibm.com] Gesendet: Freitag, 15. August 2008 16:38 An: sdo@lists.oasis-open.org Betreff: Re: AW: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Ron, I must not have been sufficiently clear about the scenario I am concerned about. I understand the case where you start with the context with entities and project to the context with keys. The mapping between entities and keys can be created and maintained. I agree there is no problem projecting back tot he context with entities. Now consider the opposite case. Start with an object containing keys and the mapping between entities and keys has not yet been created (perhaps the object was received via a service call). Now project to a context with entities. Those entities have to be retrieved from the data store. Or am I missing something here? Bryan Aupperle, Ph.D. STSM, WebSphere Enterprise Platform Software Solution Architect Research Triangle Park, NC +1 919-254-7508 (T/L 444-7508) Internet Address: aupperle@us.ibm.com "Barack, Ron" <ron.barack@sap.com> 08/15/2008 09:58 AM To Bryan Aupperle/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS, <sdo@lists.oasis-open.org> cc Subject AW: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi Bryan, good to know that someone is reading the proposals... I didn't mean located within the backend store, I meant within the graph reachable from Oe, called Gk in the text. Projection maintains identity (one reason why I think it can be unified with binding). That is, if I have an object O in HelperContext hc1, and I project it to HelperContext hc2, then O == hc1.project( hc2.project( O )) What I really what to say in the proposal is that the same must hold true for keys. That is, if the O has a property p, that is a DataObject in hc1, and a key in hc2, then o.get(p) == (hc1.project( hc2.project ( O ))) .get(p); Moreover, whereever I set the value of a property in the transitive closure reachable from hc2.project(O) (Gk in the text), to the value of hc2.project(O).get(p), then, when I project back into hc1, I will always get the same instance, namely O.get(p). It's actually easy, it's just hard to say it. Basically, it means that when you project from a context with entities to a context with keys, the user has implicitly defined a map from entities to keys based on the objects in the projection. This map is not universal... it's based solely on the graph being transfered. Did that help or make things worse? Ron Von: Bryan Aupperle [mailto:aupperle@us.ibm.com] Gesendet: Freitag, 15. August 2008 15:25 An: sdo@lists.oasis-open.org Betreff: Re: AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys This is a tangential question, and perhaps one that I should already know the answer to, but here goes. In your example with context Ce and Ck, if I have object Ok and project it into Ce, then for each key in Ok the corresponding entity has to be located. Since we have agree that entity management is a DAS responsibility and not an SDO library responsibility, are we laying any new requirements on DASs, or has the DAS group already agreed that there has to be a standard API for returning an entity given a key? Bryan Aupperle, Ph.D. STSM, WebSphere Enterprise Platform Software Solution Architect Research Triangle Park, NC +1 919-254-7508 (T/L 444-7508) Internet Address: aupperle@us.ibm.com "Barack, Ron" <ron.barack@sap.com> 08/14/2008 07:20 AM To <sdo@lists.oasis-open.org> cc Subject AW: [sdo] ISSUE 119: Projection and Keys Hi Everyone, I've modified the proposal a bit, based on Frank's suggestion that projection from keys to entities be made more intelligent. In fact, I think that the behavior is now intelligent enough so that a second project method giving a "restoreContext" is no longer required. New text is in blue. Comments of course are very welcome. Ron Use Cases for Keys and Projection We begin with a motivating use case. Domain models tend to be larger and complex than the views used by individual clients. Moreover, when going from a large server-side model, it is necessary to define the scope of the data which should be transmitted to a remote client. The boundaries of the data which should be transmitted in a single packet must somehow be defined. On the other hand, the door must be left open for clients to further explore the model in succeeding calls to the server. Imagine a service that returns an Employee object. In the domain model, Employee has a refence to Department, and Department in turn has a list of all Employees. If we define the transmission packet to be the transient closure reachable from Employee, then we can never send a single employee, we will always send the complete list of employees in the department. Our approach is to use keys to represent the boundary points in a transmission packet. It is assumed that clients that wish to explore the model beyond these boundaries will be able to use the keys to somehow perform lookups, but the API through which this is done is out-of-scope for SDO (being more of a DAS issue). As an example, we can imagine that the server has a SDO type system in which Employee has a property with type Department. In the client's type system, however, the corresponding property has type {commonj.sdo}string. This value would represent the identity of the Department. The basic functionality we wish to achive is to allow projection between these two HelperContexts. Keys and Projection A type and its keyType are compatible with each other. That mean, an object with a reference to an entity in one context can be projected onto an object with a reference to the key type in another context. We illustrate this with an example. HelperContext #1 Type Employee * property - id (Integer) - KEY * property - name (String) * property - direct-report (List of Employee) is compatible with the metamodel HelperContext #2 Type Employee * property - id (Integer) - KEY * property - name (String) * property - direct-report (List of Integer) Here we see the type of the direct-report property has been replaced in the second HelperContext with the corresponding key type. The projection from an entity to its key has some important semantic differences when compared with projection between entities. Projection between entities creates a new view of the same underlying data. By contrast, a key does not represent a view, but rather a reference to an entity in the underlying data model. When working with different views of the same underlying data, it is natural that changes in one view are reflected in all other views. By contrast, changing the value of a key changes the target of the reference rather than the value of the key property in the referenced data object. When projecting from an entity to a key, a new instance of the key is always created. By contrast, when we project from entity to entity, we get the same number of objects in the target HelperContext that we had in the source HelperContext. Conversely, when projecting from a key to an entity then for each distinct key value within the graph being projected, all references to that key must resolve to the same entity. In many scenarios data will round-trip between contexts, including between contexts in which entity map to keys. Let us consider two context Ce and Ck, representing the entity and the key context, respectively, and a DataObject Oe, in context Ce. Projecting Oe into Ck returns a DataObject, Ok. The transitive closure reachable from Ok is Gk. Every key value in Gk maps to an single entity in Ce, and it is this entity is that is found when Ok (and effective, all of Gk) is projected back into Ce. In cases where the user has set a key property to a value that is not found in Gk, then, as a result of projecting Ok into Ce, a new entity will be created. The created entity has default values for all properties other than the key fields. We illustrate with an example. Note that the example uses containment relationships in both contexts. This is done for clarity, since it allows an XML representation of the data. The use-case, however, is stronger when the contexts have different (or perhaps no) containment structures. Imagine the following data in HelperContext #1 <employee id="11"> <name>Foo Bar</name> <direct-report id="21"> <name>Jane Doe</name> </direct-report> <direct-report id="31"> <name>Jim Jones</name> </direct-report> <direct-report id="22"> <name>John Smith</name> </direct-report> </employee> After projecting to HelperContext #2, we have the following data <employee id="11"> <name>Foo Bar</name <direct-report>21</direct-report> <direct-report>31</direct-report> <direct-report>22</direct-report> </employee> If we imagine the client changes the list of direct reports, so that the second item in the list has value ?41? instead of ?31?, then the meaning of the change is not that the employee with name ?Jim Jones? now has a new ID, but that ?Jim Jones? has been replaced by another employee. On projecting from context 2 back into context 1, the instance of Employee with id="22" would be detached from the Employee with id="11". Also a new Employee with id="41" would be created and added as a direct report to the Employee with id="11". If the graph in context 1 were in scope of a ChangeSummary, then because the "direct-report" property in context1 is a containment property, the change would be tracked as a delete or a create. If the relationship were non-containment, the change would be tracked as a modification to the employee with id=11, not as a delete to the employee with id=22 or as the creation of a new employee with id=41; semantically, it is only the reference to entity 22 that has changed, the entity itself still exists, and is unaltered. Projecting this data from context 2: <employee id="11"> <name>Foo Bar</name <direct-report>21</direct-report> <direct-report>41</direct-report> <direct-report>22</direct-report> </employee> Into context 1 yields: <employee id="11"> <name>Foo Bar</name> <direct-report id="21"> <name>Jane Doe</name> </direct-report> <direct-report id="41"/> <direct-report id="22"> <name>John Smith</name> </direct-report> </employee> Projection between entities and keys becomes more powerful when the relationship through which the entities tie into the graph are non-containment. The following example shows how a complex model that lacks containment relationships can be projected onto a context that requires a specific XML serialization, which implicitly prunes the orignal domain to the requirements of a specific client. HelperContext #1 Type School * property - name (String) - KEY * property - students (Student) - many=true * property - courses (Course) - many=true Type Student * property - name (String) - KEY * property - courses (Course) - many=true, containment=false, opposite=students * property - school (School) - containment=false, opposite=students Type Course * property - name (String) - KEY * property - students (Students) - many=true, containment=false, opposite=courses * property - school (School) - containment=false, opposite=courses Notice the m:n relationship between Student and Course. If we imagine a service that should expose this domain model to clients, it is possible that some clients will wish to obtain the list of students participating in a particular course, while other clients may wish to obtain the list of courses in which a particular student is enrolled. The application cannot determine based on the structure of the data which of the two possible containment structures is "correct". Notice also that returning the transitive closure would return all the data associated with the entire school. In this example the client wants the data structured according to the following XSD <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <schema xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" targetNamespace= "http://projection <http://projection/> " xmlns:tns="http://projection <http://projection/> " elementFormDefault="qualified"> <complexType name="School"> <sequence> <element name="students" type="tns:Student" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> </sequence> <attribute name="name" type="string"/> </complexType> <complexType name="Student"> <sequence> <element name="courses" type="string" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> </sequence> <attribute name="name" type="string"/> </complexType> <element name="school" type="tns:School"/> </schema> Notice that we are imposing a containment structure on the original context, as well as pruning it by replacing the course entity by the corresponding key. The following code illustrates the behavior of the project method. DataObject cal = _helperContext.getDataFactory().create(School.class); // Create the SDO graph cal.set("name","Berkeley"); DataObject billy = cal.createDataObject("students"); billy.set("name", "Billy Bear"); DataObject bob = cal.createDataObject("students"); bob.set("name", "Bobbie Bear"); DataObject basketWeaving = cal.createDataObject("courses"); basketWeaving.set("name", "Basket Weaving"); DataObject algol = cal.createDataObject("courses"); algol.set("name", "Algol"); DataObject revolution = cal.createDataObject("courses"); revolution.set("name", "Revolution"); // hook things up billy.getList("courses").add(basketWeaving); billy.getList("courses").add(algol); bob.getList("courses").add(basketWeaving); bob.getList("courses").add(revolution); // Create a second context defined by an XSD HelperContext hc2 = HelperProvider.getNewContext(); hc2.getXSDHelper().define(getClass().getClassLoader().getResou rceAsStream("com/sap/sdo/testcase/internal/pojo/ex/projection.xsd"), null); // Project from the java context to the XSD context DataObject projection = hc2.getDataFactory().project(cal); // Produce XML based on the XSD String xml = hc2.getXMLHelper().save(projection, "http://projection <http://projection/> ", "school"); // I'm imagining here that sending the XML out over the wire (eg, using it as a response to a // WebService request. On the client side, we go from the XML back to SDO. We use the context // based on the XSD. DataObject projection2 = hc2.getXMLHelper().load(xml).getRootObject(); // We can make some changes. We can add a new course... projection2.getList("students.0/courses").add("Fortran and You"); // So, now the trip back to the server? //I'm skipping the XML step, and simply projecting the modified (XML oriented) data back into // my java context DataObject cal2 = _helperContext.getDataFactory().project(projection2); // Test that there is one entity per key value DataObject billy2 = (DataObject)cal2.getList("students").get(0); DataObject basketWeavingBill = (DataObject)billy2.getList("courses") .get(0); DataObject bob2 = (DataObject)cal2.getList("students").get(1); DataObject basketWeavingBob = (DataObject)bob2.getList("courses").get(0); assertSame(basketWeaving2, basketWeavingBob); --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this mail list, you must leave the OASIS TC that generates this mail. 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