The inheritance model as described here http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?108657-Inheritance-in-spring-data-graph is nice when one wants to do polymorphic queries, when the types should be looked at together at once. For example Person with Customer and Employee and a general search is desired.
However, when the types should be treated separately, and they just happen to have a common superclass because they share common functionality then I'd wish to have something like JPA @MappedSuperclass. As it is now, when I annotate my subtypes with @NodeEntity then the attributes of the superclass are simply ignored. There is no annotation to also include those fields in the Entity. This means I'm left with the 2 choices: 1) The subtypes have the @NodeEntity annotation. Move all fields down to the impls, which can cause a lot of boilerplate code. Using a common parent class becomes almost useless. Then, the Repository interfaces (those extending GraphRepository) are created for each subtype, and the types are queried separately. 2) The supertype has the @NodeEntity annotation. Keep the common fields in the superclass. If there is an @Indexed String then it can be queried only through the parent class (the Repository for the parent class). If one wants to only find certain subtypes then he has to loop through the result and filter. With millions of objects, as is the case for me, this is the higher cost. So my wish is to have the @MappedSuperclass feature. And it would be nice if such facts were documented so that not everyone has to ask or figure out himself by trial and error. My assumptions caused me to change code back and forth a couple of times. It seems to me that the developers are spending a lot of their time answering questions. best, gonfi _______________________________________________ Neo4j mailing list [email protected] https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
