There are three very good sources of information about how to model stuff in the data store. This group is one place, I would also suggest reading this: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/modeling.html And watching this: http://sites.google.com/site/io/building-scalable-web-applications-with-google-app-engine
As far as you specific question goes, how do you want to use the list of friends? Are you planning to just put a monster list of everyone you know and everyone they know? Are you going to make the list paged, browseable, or searchable? I am sure I have seen some presentations / discussions related to modeling "networks" using the GAE and the datastore, but I can not find them at the moment. Robert On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 2:37 PM, MahatmaManic <mahatmama...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. > > -- 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.
