Apple

EOF makes so much easy that I get lulled into the idea that I know what I'm doing ...

WebObject 5.4.2, recent Wonder, Mac OS 10.5.3, MySQL 5.1.23 db

Three tables: Author, Advert, Select ... legacies that I don't have control over (and the real tables contain more unrelated information). The original tables are in Oracle and I used Entity Modeler to derive a model, changed it to use ERPrototypes so I could make types canonical, and used that to generate a MySQL database for testing the logic of a re-write (incorporating Wonder) of the business logic around this structure.

Author +----+

| ID | PKey

+----+

| .. |

+----+

| .. |

+----+

| |

Advert +----+

| ID | PKey

+----+

| .. |

+----+

| .. |

+----+

| |

Select +----------+

| authorID |

+----------+

| advertID |

+----------+

A Select connects one Author to one Advert; Author can have many Selects, as can Adverts -- simple stuff.

The Select table has no primary keys (in Oracle both attributes were "indexes" but not primary keys, but this doesn't translate, as far as I can tell, to MySQL -- ans if it did, not to Entity Modeler). The result is that Entity Modeler complains -- and EOGeneration dons't run. So I made both attributes primary keys (they both need to be, because neither would be unique in its own right), and generated my EOGenericRecord classes, etc.

In my code I call:

Select.createSelect(_ec, author, advert);

and I get:

Adaptor com.webobjects.jdbcadaptor.JDBCAdaptor@1701fd failed to provide new primary keys for entity 'Select'

at com.webobjects.eoaccess.EODatabaseContext.prepareForSaveWithCoordinator(EODatabaseContext.java:5713)

at com.webobjects.eocontrol.EOObjectStoreCoordinator.saveChangesInEditingContext(EOObjectStoreCoordinator.java:370)

at com.webobjects.eocontrol.EOEditingContext.saveChanges(EOEditingContext.java:3192)

at er.extensions.eof.ERXEC._saveChanges(ERXEC.java:968)

I could allow setters on authorID and advertID, but that doesn't seem right. It would force the exposure of the IDs on Author and Advert and I generally try to treat primary keys as database artifacts and keep them out of my code.

I'm not a WO novice, but I do keep feeling like one as I explore its depths. I'm a single developer without the benefit of nearby buddies with whom I can talk this kind of thing through with (and my wife loses interest pretty quickly!); this list IS my buddies so be gentle if I seem to be an idiot!!

Ultimately, my question is, "What is the right way to do this?" .. where "right" includes correctness AND goodness! Thank you .. Gav