Concerning DataModel usage plus overhead?

[Rick Reumann]

I haven't really used the DataModel class yet, but as described by Brendan in another thread, I have a couple of questions about the concepts behind it...

First a simple example...

Want to display on a page a list of employees. User should be able to click on employee and brought to an edit page to edit the employee.

My question in a previous thread was how to best accomplish this. I figured a simple link passing in an  ID would make the most sense, but it seems like there was recommendations to use a dataModel. But say my initial ist was...

Fred
John
Billy

Questions:

1) I want to click on one of those names and edit the user. This initial collection of employees shouldn't contain the full employee info - its just name and ID. It's way too much overhead to pull back the full employee information at this stage, so all I have as a name and an ID.

2) Why would I want to really save the state of this tableData in this case using t:saveState since I really don't care about this list anymore once the name is clicked. I'm going to be brought to a totally new editEmployee screen and no longer need this collection around. When I want the updated list I should get it from the backend again.

Please someone help me understand how to best accomplish what I want to do. It seems like such an easy concept but yet I haven't seen a good explanation or an example (granted I don't have the O'Reilly book, from what seems to be described I'm not certain that example will be what I want either).

Thanks so much.

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Rick