Hi, I am new to ORM and Cayenne. I a pretty puzzled by relationship flattening and the way we use Modeller to achieve this.[1] For example, I have 4 tables. Magazines, Subscriptions, Readers and Subscription_Types.Subscription is essentially a "join" table that makes many-to-many relationship between Readers and magazines. Subscription_Types is a table which is used to mark each magazine and reader relationship. (hopefully the diagram below explains this)
Magazines -------->> Subscriptions <<-------- ReadersSubscription_Types -------^^ My goal is to do this: 1. Magazine object should have List of Readers in such a way that I can get SubscriptionType object from it. That is, subscriptionObject = magazineObject.getReadersList().get(i).getSubscriptionType() 2. The same way, I should be able to do similar action from Readers side. Such that If I have a readers object I can get all associated magazines and the subscriptionType of each magazine. -------I am a bit confused because 1. I have to join by primary key, if I want to do "to dep PK". The problem is, doing so, I do not see any foreign-key column in dependent (Subscriptions) table. If I create explicit foreign key columns and join using them, I can't check "to Dep PK". 2. Coming to relationship flattening. I can flatten the relationship between readers and magazines... but the issue is, we have another dimension to it - SubscriptionType. I am not sure how to incorporate this attribute in each reader and magazine when accessed as mentioned in the goals above. Since I do not see place where query is created or how flattening is done (from DB point of view) in Cayenne, I feel a little uncomfortable with Relationship flattening. I am going through Cayenne 2 documentations, user guide, Map.xml and a bit of source code. Though the brevity of explanations and lack of real-world example is a bit annoying. I am used to DAO, VO kind of architecture; with Cayenne (or probably any ORM tool) being everything implicit, I am going cold feet. Any help would be appreciated. ---[1] http://cayenne.apache.org/doc12/cayennemodeler-flattened-relationships.html Nishant Love Cricket? Check out live scores, photos, video highlights and more. Click here http://cricket.yahoo.com
