While its true that Torque doesn't appear to support outer joins, I don't see this as a great problem. I have to confess that I start going to sleep when I start hearing talk of such things.
If your application needs to support multiple languages (which I believe is your actual problem) then my suggestion would be that this is achievable without getting all DBA about it.
Your obviously a brighter spark than me and therefore I'll assume that whatever suggestions that would be made will be dismissed. In fact you're so much brighter that I can't even see what your problem is.
Again I'm probably wrong but it looks to be that your solutions are more complex than the problem in hand. The reading I've done suggests that torque is best used in a way that tables define your objects (I think somebody suggested that on this thread), I concede that this could be a problem if you're inheriting a DB that can't be changed. However if your talk of outer joins and ad hoc queries is for a project without these legacy issues then I'd maintain that you real problem is "How to make a multilingual application using torque?" and not "How can I shoe-horn my DBA knowledge into torque?"
I'm off to bank, and to sell everything I own so I can give all of it to Microsoft. The .NET stuff does look quite tidy, especially considering what a dogs-dinner they made of such things in the past. Personally I have no real issue with .NET I just prefer innovation over plagiarism. I don't see anything very new with .NET..
Last time I hooked used oracle ODBC drivers with oracle I had to run all my longs through a loop and remove zeros, special (concession: This was pre .NET).. I fail to remember exactly how much this had a negative effect on "developer productivity" and certainly didn't seem very "value-added" to be.. I'm glad that they must have sorted this out.
Cheers mark
On Wednesday, Jul 2, 2003, at 04:37 Europe/London, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Well, I am a little amused to find my original post generated so many
feedbacks. After ignoring those anti-MS defenses and empty OM babble which
have no contribution to the issue at hand, my conclusion is still unchanged:
that CURRENT Torque 3.0 cannot provide added-value support for ad hoc query
simply because there is no object modeling for ad hoc query at all. This can
be demonstrated in the Torque xml schma dtd at
http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/dtd/database.dtd:
<!ELEMENT database (table+)>
You can see the ONLY database entity Torque can model is a table.
Surprisingly, I found building Torque OM out of ad hoc query isn't that a
challange. All it requires is being able to support following schma xml:
<!ELEMENT database (table+,query+)>
Here "query" element is used to build an ad hoc query. An example would be:
<query>
<select>
<field name="name" type="varchar" formular="nvl(T2.name,T1.name)">
<field name="id" type="integer" formular="T1.id">
</select>
<from>
<table name="A" alias="T1">
<table name="A_TR" alias="T2">
</from>
<where>
...
</where>
<orderby>
...
</orderby>
</query>
In fact <query> element is easier to implement than <table> because you don't
need to generate sql out of it and you don't need to worry about pk-fk
relations with other entities. All it requires for an OM is to parse to a SQL
statement and "fill" out the data at runtime. It can even be extended easily
to support parametrized query. Note that in the formular attribute you can
write any SQL statement that is supported by the underlining DBMS (I use
Oracle nvl as illustration). This defies Java's philosophy: rather than
scaling down to most-common denominator, delegate to the underlying layer
instead.
The only difficulty I can foresee is to support wild card query. But to start
with, it's not a big deal to omit it.
That's my idea so far. As a side note, for those who don't familiar with .Net
and doubt its cross vendor support, it is also built to support multiple DBMS
like Torque. I runs it on an Oracle server w/o any problem.
Fred
Quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
This is not a matter of how one thinks. It's a matter of can or cannot, and
to what degree of easiness and efficiency.
If Torque's OM can solve the issue I stated without multiple db hits for
performance's sake, I wouldn't mind to think in terms of OM. But if OM
cannot match the flexibility of SQL, which is what Torque is trying to
replace as API, then it is fruitless no matter how hard you think in
Torque's way. Torque OM simply cannot live up to such a modest expectation.
In fact, I would be open to another OM tool, lest to say breaking Torque's
OM.
From my investigation, Torque's limitation is molded in its design.
Torque's
OM is built out of a Table of a database. Comparing with Microsoft's .Net's
dataset OM, which can be built out of an ad hoc query and modified at
design
time in the format of XML, the technology lag of Torque is apparent.
Fred
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Lowe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Turbine Torque Users List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2003 6:39 AM Subject: Re: question on Torque's limitation
I'm also pretty new to torque but resorting to SQL breaks the model..
My understanding is that you should have to think in terms of SQL but
in terms of the object model, which is the whole point. I'll have a
look over the documentation, but I'd be very disappointed if it was the
case that you'd have to do this. From what I've seen so far the api
would only be more complex than it needs if you're still thinking in
SQL rather than Objects.
My money is on all this being possible without breaking any design patterns (e.g. resorting to sql). I'll drop another posting when I've taken a look and can be more helpful.
Cheers mark
On Tuesday, Jul 1, 2003, at 09:34 Europe/London, Sam Le Berrigaud wrote:
Hello,
I am also quite new to Torque. But what I think I would is not use
Criteria to do so, I would rather use the executeQuery method in which
you can write your own SQL with no problem. Maybe you could also try
to write your own criteria as shown in criteria how-to in the section
simplifying Criteria.
Regards,
SaM
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Suppose I have an Oracle table called A and a table called A_TR (TR
stands for translation) for multi-language support. These two tables
contain following columns respectively:
A.ID (pk), A.NAME
A_TR.ID(pk, fk to A.ID), A_TR.LOCALE (pk), A_TR.NAME
If I want to get A_TR.NAME if it is available, othwise use A.NAME. Using SQL, I can get it pretty easily: select nvl(A_TR.name,A.name) as name from A, A_TR where A.id=A_TR.id(+) and lower(A_TR.locale(+)) = lower('en-us')
But it seems in Torque this will be awefully complex if not
impossible (unless I resort back to brute force SQL). The
complication arises from:
1. Creteria doesn't support outer-join
2. The peer class doesn't support ad hoc SELECT clause. I can only
get the columns within a table. Combining columns in two tables with
Oracle function such as NVL is almost impossible.
Since I am new to Torque, I would like confirmation if these indeed are limitation of Torque. Is there any get-around that doesn't need multiple db hit (don't take query cache into account)?
Thanks
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