Hi all. I find that when I query over relationships I (and my users) almost always want an outer join. For example, if I ask for a list of Employee objects based on the expression ((name=’McDonald’) or (employee.company.name=‘McDonald’)), I don’t want to exclude employees named “McDonald" that don’t have an associated company record. The part of the query that involves the company is separated from the first part by a logical “or” and thus the user will always believe that it should not affect results of other parts of the expression. Checking for employees without a company feels like a third condition that should be explicitly stated.
I know I can call “outer()” on a property every time I’m constructing paths to query on, however, that gets old fast (and easy to forget), so currently I’m doing string replace in my paths, replacing “.” with “+.”. That makes me feel dirty. So, I ask: Is there any way for me to ask Cayenne to implicitly perform outer joins when filtering on expressions, unless explicitly otherwise stated? For example, when modeling relationships? (as is done in EOF) Cheers, - hugi // Hugi Thordarson // http://www.loftfar.is/ <http://www.loftfar.is/> // s. 895-6688