I am developing an application in Flex, using Blaze DS to communicate with a Java back-end, which provides persistence via JPA (Eclipse Link).
I am encountering issues when passing JPA entities to Flex via Blaze DS. Blaze DS uses reflection to convert the JPA entity into an ObjectProxy (effectively a HashMap) by calling all getter methods on the entity. This includes any lazy-initialised one/many-to-many relationships.
You can probably see where I am going. If I pass a single object through JPA this will call all one/many-to-many methods on this object. For each returned object if they have one/many-to-many relationships they will be called too. As such, by passing back a single JPA entity I actually end up doing multiple database calls and passing all related entries back as a single ObjectProxy instance!
My solution to date is to create a translator to convert each entity to an ObjectProxy and vice-versa. This is clearly cumbersome and there must be a better way.
Thoughts please?
Unfortunately, lazy-loading is not easy to accomplish with Flash clients. There are some working solutions, like dpHibernate, but so far all the different solutions I have tested fall short of what you would expect in terms of performance and ease of use.
So in my experience, it is the best and most reliable solution to always use DTOs, which adds the benefit of cleanly separating the database and view layers. This necessitates, though, that you implement either eager loading, or a second server round trip to resolve your many-to-many relations, as well as a good deal more boilerplate code to copy the DAO and DTO field values.
Which one to choose depends on your use case: Sometimes getting only the main object's fields might be enough, then you could simply omit the List of related objects from your DTO (transfer only those values you need for your query). Sometimes you may actually need the entire list of related entities, and then you could get it via eager loading, or by setting up a second remote object to find only the list.