Apple

Hi David A., Chuck or anybody knowledgable about ERXCopyable,

Since I started using Wonder I noticed that when an EO is created and inserted into the editing context the to-many relationships have an empty array. I really like this because it eliminated a lot of null checking logic before accessing to many relationships, I.e. I can do myToMany().count() without fear that I will get a null pointer exception.

I started using ERXCopyable and like it very much. In one of my EO’s I have a special to-many relationship where the objects in it have to be copied over in a specific order. Therefore, I specified the Nullify copy type for that to-many. That sets the to-many to null. I then wrote the custom logic to copy the objects in the to-many in the correct order. However, I encountered a null pointer exception because the to-many is null and the code written it assumes that the to-many starts out with an empty array.

It’s no big deal as I can work around it. However, it made me think that maybe the Nullify copy type should leave to-many relationships alone instead of setting them to null. Something like this:

…

	case NULLIFY:

		// Null out the to-one and leave to-many as is so that it remains as an empty array

		if (relationship.isToMany() ==
false) {

			destination.takeStoredValueForKey(null, relationshipName);

}

		break;

…

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Ricardo Parada