A post on rails-talk led me to worry about the following:
post.comments.first.title = 'Foo'
post.comments.collect &:author #this line isn't really important - anything that requires loading the collection will do
Ta-da! post.comments.first.title reverts to its old value (because it's now a different object - the first item of the freshly loaded collection as opposed to just the result of find :first).
This behaviour is rather unintuitive to me (and I would have thought conducive to hard to track down bugs) - Thoughts?
Fred
Ta-da! post.comments.first.title reverts to its old value (because
it's now a different object - the first item of the freshly loaded
collection as opposed to just the result of find :first).
This behaviour is rather unintuitive to me (and I would have thought
conducive to hard to track down bugs) - Thoughts?
There are a bunch of other corner cases which present themselves when
you start digging in, and a bunch of error cases to account for when
fixing them. Putting an identity map in there would solve some of
those problems, but involve a lot of work and handling some additional
errors like StaleObject and AlreadyAttachedObject and all that jazz.
If someone wanted to play around with it in a git branch then we'd
have a better idea about the work involved, for now it's just a vague
sense of foreboding.
identity map ?
It's a way of guaranteeing that there's only one object with a given
id in a given context:
http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/identityMap.html
Ah yes. I had an inkling that might be what you were talking about. That itself might introduce some subtle differences in behaviour
Fred
Ah yes. I had an inkling that might be what you were talking about.
That itself might introduce some subtle differences in behaviour
It introduces huge differences in behaviour for some situations like:
def whatever
@foo = Foo.find(1)
# Some other process updates foo 1
@foos = Foo.find(:all) # do you retain the old data for foo#1 or
replace it with the new data, or raise an exception?
end
The first part of an identity map is easy, it's defining the behaviour
in all the edge cases that makes it hard, 
That's a bit of a bastard It's not even that much of an edge case.
Fred
