On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Rick Richardson <rick.richardson@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 10:35 AM, Michael Snoyman <michael@snoyman.com> wrote:

As a short term solution, I think you're right. However, I think we might want to consider a slightly more sophisticated approach... I say consider specifically, because I'm really not certain that what I'm saying is a good idea.

I think there's basically three problems with the approach of using a PersistValue inside a PersistKey:

1) It will probably hurt performance, since we'll need to do more checking.

2) The code becomes a bit more fragile. By adding this sum type to the mix, we're adding necessity for a number of checks that can fail.

3) There's nothing stopping you from inserting a value into one database (say, SQLite), getting a key, and then looking up in MongoDB. (Not that this is a flaw in the current approach as well.)

I agree on the first two points. I think the principle behind 3 is actually a feature. 

 

So here's the idea: each database backend will have an associated type for its key datatype. Then, instead of having:

    data Key entity = Int64

we'll have

    data Key entity backend = BackendKey backend

(ignoring all the newtype wrappers). I think this should solve both the issue you raise about MongoDB, and the three points I mention above. However, I'm still concerned that it might lead to difficult-to-follow code. There's really only one way to find out, but I just wanted to bounce the idea around before diving in.

I am going to negate my previous email. After thinking on this a bit. I think that setting they key type at the PersistEntity is the correct approach.
This would be the only way to handle keys as strings or composite keys (if we want to support either) 

There are 2 use cases- relying on MongoDB to auto-generate a key, or providing one's own key. Now technically the key provided could be almost any PersistValue. But I think in practice it is likely to be an integer or an ObjectId. And I think even those use cases are likely to be the exception, not the rule. For now, to get this working, I think it is reasonable to assume that no id value will be provided by the user- that mongoDB will always be auto-generating it. So we should be able to just accommodate the key the same way as a normal db, except that it is 12 bit number. And then it should be easy to go from there to support the user supplying their own ObjectId (which is the 12 bit number that MongoDB auto-generates). And supporting inserting an integer with the overhead of assuming it is 12bits would be easy also.