Dear Agavi Users, I am looking for advice on the best approach to synchronisation of data entities with a 1:n relationship in a REST system.
Consider the form http://pastebin.com/c9NJH72k The primary entity is Person, which has one or more Address. When a user wants to edit a Person via a form, they can add and remove addresses and the form is dynamically updated with Javascript. The form is posted with the person id in the URL. In the case of adding a new addresses, there is no problem. In the case of editing addresses, also there is no problem since existing entities are identified by a hidden address id. However the main problem arises when handling removal of addresses. What is the best way to handle the post back of data where addresses are removed? I've considered the problems and have come up with a few ideas: 1. When the data is posted back all existing address entities are deleted and any new ones specified in the form are added. However this leads to problems with associations to other entities as primary keys will always change. 2. The form dynamically includes a 'removed_address_id' and deletes those records specifically. However, this means there is a strong JS dependency. 3. The system performs some sort of synchronisation by loading all addresses for a person and then removes, updates or adds the records accordingly. However this seems to present a possible overhead when dealing with many associations. Is there a more fundamentally better approach to designing this common scenario? Kind regards Hash (hzilla) _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.agavi.org/mailman/listinfo/users
