[CFCDev] TO, Beans, etc.

[Bill Rawlinson]

The majority of the time my application needs a readonly copy of an object, a plain vanilla TO
sometimes I need a mutable object (a bean with setters) but this is far more rare

for instance most of the time folks are just viewing information about the object so a TO is perfect, it can be populated from the database, no validation on output needed,
and displayed.  However, before saving or updating an object with new user input I need a bean to populate, and validate against.  As some of my beans are fairly large I
thought, for performance concerns, that passing a TO around, and not a full Bean, would make more sense in the majority case of just viewing the object.


as I refactor (I was always passing the full Bean) I'm trying to decide on some things.  first off should my DAO populate a TO and then, if necessary create a bean from the TO  OR should I build a bean and have it return a TO if necessary.  Currently my Beans have the methods setFromTO() and getTO() available publicly so either path would be fine - though at the moment I am always building the bean and calling getTO()  - which seems, to me wasting resources.

Also, when I call my manager object to get either a bean or a TO should I have two separate method calls, one that gets a readonlyObject (TO) and another that getsanObject (bean)?
or should I have one method with a boolean argument of readonly and I return the corresponding object based on that (thus forcing me into a return type of any - not particularly nice).

I really don't like having the "pattern" name in the method call such as getObjectTO() or getObjectBean()

so, what do you think I should do?

1. should I build a TO and only construct a bean from a TO when I actually need a bean (or leave as is, creating the bean and returning the TO).
2. should I have two different methods of some name where one returns a bean and the other a TO or have one method with a readonly argument?


thanks in advance,
Bill


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