Excuse my ignorance, but what's EAHCP?

Agreed, the second issue won't happen if you remain in the context of a
session, but this bit me when I was working with a non-web app and had
entities that had a lifetime in memory between sessions.  I only made the
point because I was bitten and figure it's worth others knowing about.

Cheers,

Symon.

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Ayende Rahien <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 5:29 AM, Symon Rottem <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> There are a couple of problems with this approach - it's pretty good, but
>> I it's still got a couple of holes.
>>
>> There are a couple of issues:
>>
>>
>> 1.  The cast in the equals method will not necessarily result in the type
>> you're expecting:
>>
>>
>>
>> T other = obj as T;
>>
>>
>>
>> If the current instance is a DomesticCat and the passed instance is a Cat
>> proxy that, in fact, represents a DomesticCat instance then the cast would
>> fail and return null because the Cat proxy cannot be cast to DomesticCat.
>> This could be worked around using the NHibernateUtils.GetClass(entity)
>> method, but that might cause performance issues since the DB would need to
>> be hit for proxies...
>>
>> This doesn't happen in practice. Because it is Cat that inherit from
> EAHCP.
>
>
>
>>
>>
>> 2.  This approach will still break if you have a transient entity that you
>> persist then evict from the Session thereby making it disconnected then
>> compare it with another loaded copy of same entity; the loaded entity and
>> the disconnected entity will be seen as equal but will have different
>> hashcodes breaking the contract which indicates that if equals() returns
>> true then hashcode comparison should also return true.
>>
>> This approach assume that you are using an entity in the context of a
> session. If you try to mix things, it is on your head to make sure
> everything works.
>
>
>>  Certainly the approach will work for the majority of circumstances, but
>> it's probably worth being aware of the pitfalls just in case you fall into
>> them. :)
>>
>> Personally I've worked around the problem by making a base class for my
>> entities that has a read only "lifetime id" property that's allocated a GUID
>> value at instantiation and is used for equality and hashcode comparisons.
>> Note that this property is *not* used as the identity map - my entities
>> still have an Id property for that.  The "lifetime id" property is persisted
>> and mapped using field access so the read only property can be set when a
>> persisted entity is loaded.
>>
>>
>
>
>> In effect, the GUID is generated when the transient instance is
>> instantiated and is then persisted with the object; at any point that the
>> persistent entity is reloaded the value is reloaded with it.  If the entity
>> is evicted from the session or the session is closed making it a
>> disconnected entity the lifetime id doesn't change.  If the entity is
>> deleted and made transient it still remains the same.  You could even
>> re-persist it.
>>
>> Of course, the drawback is that every entity row must now store an
>> additional GUID, however it's not necessary to have an index on this column
>> as it will never be searched, so it's not *too* expensive.  You might want
>> to make it unique, however, but I don't this it's essential as the
>> likelyhood of having two conflicting GUIDs in memory at the same time seems
>> rather low.
>>
>> There may be a better way of handling this, but I haven't found it. :)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Symon.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 5:33 AM, Ayende Rahien <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2007/06/05/Generic-Entity-Equality.aspx
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:32 PM, Tim Barcz <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I am reading through a book on NHibernate (NHIbernate in Action,
>>>> Manning) and when talking about comparing entity values based on database
>>>> identifier (which is what EntityBase does) it strongly discourages equality
>>>> based on database Id's:
>>>>
>>>> Unfortunately, this solution has one huge problem: NHibernate doesn't
>>>>> assign identifier values until an
>>>>> entity is saved. So, if the object is added to an ISet before being
>>>>> saved, its hash code changes while it's
>>>>> contained by the ISet, contrary to the contract defined by this
>>>>> collection. In particular, this problem makes
>>>>> cascade save (discussed later in this chapter) useless for sets. We
>>>>> strongly discourage this solution (database
>>>>> identifier equality).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Generally DDD looks at an Entity's unique ID for determining equality.
>>>> However I'm a bit concerned at the strong warning from the NHibernate camp
>>>> about this type of equality comparison.
>>>>
>>>> What's the thought on this?  I'd be interested in hearing arguments on
>>>> either side.
>>>>
>>>> Tim
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Symon Rottem
>> http://blog.symbiotic-development.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> >
>


-- 
Symon Rottem
http://blog.symbiotic-development.com

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