On Dec 11, 2007, at 8:02 PM, Bill Burke wrote:
I was looking at the XML mapping support for Hibernate recently and
have some questions/suggestions.
One thing that seriously annoyed me was that if you do not have
embed-xml="true" you can never get access to an association/
relationship in XML format. This means that I cannot have embed-
xml="false" and load the relationship with a fetch join. Is there
any particular reason I'm missing here on why it was implemented in
this fashion?
Consistency. Partially it has to do with avoiding circular references
as you mention below, but that is really a choice for the person doing
the mapping (hence why embed-xml is even an *option*). The bigger
issue here imo is the fact that the nature of XML suggests that we are
discussing structured data; structure which is generally described by
a schema or DTD. What you do not like is the "static" nature of the
choice...
I am not "an XML person". However, I believe there is an approach
which would be great and which XML supports, but I am not certain. I
am talking about representing the association as a
"link" (potentially) to another part of the document describing the
associated data on the basis that it may be shared:
<person id="1">
<name>Bill Burke</name>
<!- here, an 'employer' element would "link" to the <company
id="1"/> reference below -->
</person>
<company id="1">
...
</company>
Then, if the association data is uninitialized you would still have
the "link", but the entity data would not be included in the document.
I think that would be a great feature/option and would gladly accept
patches for that.
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