Inheritance with GORM

Question

I have a few domain classes that are setup as such:

Person
  - Name

OrganizationPerson extends Person
  - Role
  - Organization

User 
  - Person 

In Bootstrap.groovy, I'm creating a sample user:

def person = OrganizationPeople.findOrSaveWhere(name:'admin', emailAddress: 'steven@admin.com')
person.save(flush:true)

def user = User.findOrSaveWhere(person: person, organization: organization,
                                username: 'admin', password: 'asdfasdf')

However, when the code ends up hitting the User.findOrSaveWhere I get an error:

Error initializing the application: object references an unsaved
transient instance - save the transient instance before flushing:
com.eventrosity.Person; nested exception

However, before the OrganizationPerson inherited Person, this wasn't an issue. The person.save(flush:true) saved the item.

Is this an issue in GORM? Is this an issue that I need to be aware of in the context of domain objects and inheritance?

Answer 1

This is probably just a standard validation problem - the OrganizationPeople instance save failed, so you can't proceed with saving the User. When you call save() (or something like findOrSaveWhere that calls it for you) there won't be an obvious error or an exception. But it's easy to check if the save succeeded:

def person = OrganizationPeople.findOrSaveWhere(...)
if (person.hasErrors()) {
    // handle the error
}
else {
    def user = User.findOrSaveWhere(...)
    if (user.hasErrors()) {
        // handle the error
    }
}

Note that the explicit person.save() call is redundant since findOrSaveWhere already called save() for you.