We are facing a few challenges regarding the use of the RequestFactory infrastructure with existing RDBMS tables and I wanted to be sure that we understood the current restrictions as we would need to communicate those restrictions to developers using our tools.
If there are any opportunities to assist or contribute to GWT in support of the following cases I would certainly be happy to help. Specific Challenges: Tables without ID or Version fields would require modifications to the schema and updates to all existing records - The table must be updated to add the id and version fields (or have the JPA provider auto add the new fields) - This would also mean that the existing data in the DB would need to be updated to so that each record has the version field filled in with a default value -The newly added ID value for each existing record in the table would also have to be updated with a value that is unique for each record Tables that use multiple existing fields for unique identification of each record are not supported -Many existing RDBM tables use multiple fields in their keys to uniquely identify a record -In our GWT 2.0.x support, we generate a Key object that wraps 1 - M fields based on the table design and pass this object from Client to Server -What is the position of the RequestFactory / JSONRequest handling layer here? To push a secondary identification field (id) and persist it along side the other primary key data in the db, or to enable composite keys in the GWT layers in the future? Tables with an existing field named 'id' that is a String can not have the id value passed from the client on create -The JSONRequestProcessor has a method to get the String value for the "create" operation that returns null by default -If the value of the ID was passed in from the client it would be ignored and not bound to a newly created Entity because the JSONRequest handling assumes the ID fields to be auto generated Thanks, Jack -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
