*shrug* that's what I've been doing thus far. But I don't think it's so special... I find myself writing helper methods quite a bit. :) As you point out, cayenne can't guess the correct key. But as a developer, you know what things are (should be) unique. I'm not suggesting that all to-many relationships be expressed as maps; I just think it would be nice if cayenne allowed the flexibility to specify the relationship as a map, and managed appropriate (lazy) faulting of objects, expiring stale objects, etc.
Robert Juergen Saar wrote: > I think this is a little special ... > > if you have 1..n relation to addresses this could make sense, but for a > relation order to positions this would be difficult. The only way cayenne > could provide a generell map is the PK an I don't think that this > would be > helpful. All other attributes are nor secured unique ... > > I think for the few cases where this makes sense, I would write a little > helper method. > > --- Juergen --- > > > > 2007/1/16, Robert Zeigler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> >> Currently (to the best of my knowledge), cayenne always represents a >> to-many relationship as a java.util.List. However, I was thinking it >> would be nifty if cayenne supported map-representations of to-many >> relationships. For instance, you could model a relationship between >> Users and UserPreferences as a map, and specify the "name" property of >> the UserPreferences table as the map key. Does that make sense? Am I >> the only one who thinks that would be incredibly useful? :) Is something >> like this already planned for 3.0? >> If other people would find it useful, then I'd be happy to submit a >> feature request and also work up a patch. >> >> Robert >> >
