Hi,
( If someone wants low-hanging fruit; Take the information below, and
rewrite it as documentation in markdown, under some internal-ish page. Or,
extract what the user really need to know and check that we have that
documented already or add it.)
I am getting more and more uncertain on how the Visibility rules work. This
mail is writing my notes trying to figure out what actually happens, and
whether that is semantically correct.
Let's say we have;
Connectivity Layer
MemoryEntityStore
Restlet does a newUnitOfWork()
Service Layer
FileEntityStore
DomainService doing uow.get( DomainEntity.class, "123" )
Domain Layer
JdbmEntityStore visibiliy application
DomainEntity
Infrastructure Layer
LevelDBEntityStore
And all of them have the DefaultUnitOfWorkAssembler in effect.
So, from which EnittyStore will the entity be read from?
Connectivity Layer ==?, the Restlet would have a module local
UnitOfWorkFactory which will create a UnitOfWorkInstance with "Connectivity
Layer" as Module argument. It will also create a ModuleUnitOfWork as a
Transient and therefor receive ModuleDescriptor for Connectivity Layer.
Service Layer ==> The DomainService will do call its UnitOfWorkFactory,
which will "find" the UnitOfWorkInstance from above (with the Connectivity
Layer module in it) and then instantiate a new ModuleUnitOfWork, which will
have the ModuleDescriptor of Service Layer
Domain and Infrastructure Layers ==> are totally passive.
So what happens at uow.get() in DomainService?
EntityDescriptor for DomainEntity is looked up inside ModuleUnitOfWork in
Service Layer, useing the module in Service Layer as visibility argument.
I.e. the DomainEntity must be Visibility.application.
Then UnitOfWorkInstance.get() is called, with identity, potentialModels and
the ModuelUnitOfWork as arguments. It loops through the potential models,
takes the Module in these, creates a EnityStoreUnitOfWork with that
EntityStore and tries to load the state. If successful create a
EntityInstance with this;
model = (EntityModel) entityState.entityDescriptor();
entityInstance = new EntityInstance( uow, model, entityState );
where uow is the ModuleUnitOfWork, i.e. from the module in the Service
Layer and the model containing a Module of potentialModel
selected/successful.
So, my conclusion is; it seems that the Entity Store that is visible to
the DomainEntity will be used... And that is what I think has been the
intention all the while since back in 2007/2008 somewhere when the
Visibility design was utterly flawed in the first iteration of Qi4j (the
above would require the Restlet to see everything).
--
Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer
http://polygene.apache.org - New Energy for Java
