I think it could be very powerful to consider the following concept as a way to ease data / relational integrity while still maintaing a sense of denormalization.
Often times certain fields for a model may be replicated to maintain a more embedded view of properties. This leaves the developer responsible for its upkeep often times through db.keys / ReferenceProperties between the model and its counterpart (relation). Would it be possible to stream line this by specifying that a given field should be synced to a model field; taking advantage of the backwards/forward relations maintained by ReferenceProperties. For example: class Author(db.Model): author_name = db.StringProperty() sex = db.StringProperty() birth_day = db.DateTimeProperty() ..... class Story(db.Model): author_key = db.ReferenceProperty(Author) author_name = db.StringProperty() title = db.StringProperty() date = db.DateTimeProperty() ..... Here the developer would need to maintain the author_name explicitly whenever the referring author's name changes. Although this is not often, and serves as a simple example, its often routine to have to maintain some sort 'foreign property' in this manor. It would be very powerful and encouraging to offer something like the following descriptor for a field which can be managed through handler somewhere in the background. Using the models above: I think it could be very powerful to consider the following concept as a way to ease data / relational integrity while still maintaing a sense of denormalization. Often times certain fields for a model may be replicated to maintain a more embedded view of properties. This leaves the developer responsible for its upkeep often times through db.keys / ReferenceProperties between the model and its counterpart (relation). Would it be possible to stream line this by specifying that a given field should be synced to a model field; taking advantage of the backwards/forward relations maintained by ReferenceProperties. For example: class Author(db.Model): author_name = db.StringProperty() sex = db.StringProperty() birth_day = db.DateTimeProperty() ..... class Story(db.Model): author_key = db.ReferenceProperty(Author) author_name = db.StringProperty(sync=author_key.author_name) title = db.StringProperty() date = db.DateTimeProperty() ..... What happens here is that a manager handles the backwards relations for the ReferenceProperty so that every time the related Author name changes / its synced to its counterpart "foreign fields". I am not sure that the (sync=author_key.author_name) is the most ideal way to specify this / perhaps just a new Property in general such as SyncProperty(some_key.somefield) or ForeignProperty() may be more ideal. Regardless, this would be an amazing concept to see within the app engine sdk. The point here is that author_name is still embed but managed through its related reference in terms of syncing to a value that may change. Thanks, Zach -- 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.
