I feel kind of silly about this, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around quite the right way to do something with the GAE datastore. I think I know how I would do it with a classic relational database, but...
I've got a model for a "user" which has a key_name of the user's id #. One of the things I would like a user to be able to have is a list of friends, which would be other users in the store. I'd like to have a way to calculate a user's list of friends and friends-of-friends efficiently. I think in a traditional DB I would have a "friendship" table with a user1 and user2 column, into which I'd first make a query for any entries with columns matching my user's ID and take all the "other" IDs to be my user's friends, then feed those back in for a second round to get friends-of-friends. Then again I'm mostly a client guy and what I just described may cause server/db people to weep or laugh uncontrollably ;) That said, I am just not clear on how I should be doing this with the GAE datastore. I have some inkling that maybe I should be using a list property to track a user's friends, and then do a query for all the friends with ids that are in that list, and creating a Set of all THEIR friend lists to get friends-of-friends? Am I thinking about this the right way, or am I way off base? If that is correct am I going to run into any result-limit/performance landmines if a user has a couple hundred friends? If I'm way off base can anyone point the way? I was never much good with DBs, and now it seems the small bits of knowledge I've managed to scrape together are mostly useless, so any advice folks can provide would be much appreciated. Thanks! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appeng...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
