How to delete entities with relations in Kinvey / Angular - angularjs

So lets say we have Project and Task entities in kinvey, each entity is stored in it's own collection (projects and tasks). When saving this entities I defined 'relations' so I can access the tasks related to a project easily.
// Save the Project, and save its Task as separate entity.
var promise = $kinvey.DataStore.save('project', project, {
relations : { task: 'tasks' }
});
That was easy and it's in the docs. But when deleting the task like this:
someService.deleteApplication = function(task){
return $kinvey.DataStore.destroy('tasks', task._id);
};
It does delete the item in tasks collection but an item in projects collection still holds a reference to the deleted task (In this case it says the project entity has 3 tasks (1 more than what it actually has) ).
how to overcome this ? is it in the docs?
Thanks!

It does not seem super clear from the docs but it looks like you need to update the relations in project yourself. Fetch the project using DataStore.get. Then remove the that task from the task array, then update the project using DataStore.update.
If you need to find the projects that reference that task, you can construct a query using the relation - this is from the Relational Data, Fetching, Queries area.
Kinvey does not support queries that peer into a related object’s
properties. However, you can construct queries to retrieve all
entities that have a relationship to a specific entity. This is done
by querying on the _id field of the reference.

Related

in Entity Framework, DbSet.Local remains out of sync

This one is making me crasy : I have an EF model built upon a database that contains a table named Category with 6 rows in it.
I want to display this in a drop down list in WPF, so I need to bind it to the Categories.Local Observable collection.
The problem is that this observable collection never receives the content of the database table. My understanding is that the collection should get in sync with the database when performing a query or saving data with SaveChanges() So I ran the followin 2 tests :
Categories = _db.Categories.Local;
// test 1
Debug.WriteLine(_db.Categories.Count());
Debug.WriteLine(_db.Categories.Local.Count());
// test 2
_categories.Add(new Category() { CategoryName = "test" });
_db.SaveChanges();
Debug.WriteLine(_db.Categories.Count());
Debug.WriteLine(_db.Categories.Local.Count());
Debug.WriteLine(_categories.Count());
The test 1 shows 6 rows in the database, and 0 in local.
The test 2 shows 7 rows in the database, and 1 in local (both versions)
I also atempted to use _db.Category.Load() but as expected, it doesn't work because it is db first, not code first.
I also went through this page https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj574514(v=vs.113).aspx, created an object-based data source and linked my combo box to it, without success.
Does anyone know what I am doing wrong?
Thank you in advance for your help.
The DbSet<T> class is IQueryable<T>, hence DbSet<T>.Count() method maps to Queryable.Count<T> extension method, which in turn is translated to SQL query and returns the count of the records in the database table without loading anything into db context local cache.
While DbSet<T>.Local simply gives you access to the local cache. It contains the entities that you added as well as the ones being loaded by query that returns T instances (or other entities referencing T via navigation property). In order to fully load (populate) the local cache, you need to call Load:
_db.Categories.Load();
The Load is a custom extension method defined in QueryableExtensions class, so you need to include
using System.Data.Entity;
in order to get access to it (as well as to typed Include, XyzAsync and many other EF extension methods). The Load method is equivalent of ToList but without overhead of creating additional list.
Once you do that, the binding will work. Please note that the Local will not reflect changes made to the database through different DbContext instances or different applications/users.

CakePHP 3.0: How Can I Organize These Model Functions

I am working on a CakePHP3 application that will be used to display information about which products our suppliers are currently offering.
** Different Vendors provide their product lists in different ways, CSV, JSON, or by way of a web scrape **
I have 2 models that I have created:
Vendors - This references a specific Vendor that we use.
VendorProducts - This references all the products that all of our vendors offer.
I would like to be able to call something like:
$vendor->getAvailableProducts()
and have it either get the CSV and parse it, grab the JSON, or scrape the suppliers website and use this to populate the VendorProducts table in the database with products from this supplier.
I understand the idea behind Fat Models and Skinny Controllers, however I'm having a bit of difficulty implementing this feature.
I would like to provide the following functionality.
The Vendor's getAvailableProducts() function can be called via the web interface AND/OR a cakephp shell script that could be run in a cron job.
As some functionality (like scraping the website) takes a considerable amount of time, I would like to be able to see the progress of this function in the view,
eg: X/Y Products Updated from {Supplier}.
This can be broken down into the following questions:
1. Which file should my "getAvailableProducts()" function go in?
2. As each $vendor has a unique updateProducts() function, how would the correct function be called from $vendor->getAvailableProducts()
// something like this?
public function getAvailableProducts() {
if($vendor->name == "SupplierA") {
getProductsFromSupplierA();
}
if($vendor->name == "SupplierB") {
getProductsFromSupplierB();
}
..., etc.
}
3. How can the progress of this function be returned to a View?
Don't use table classes for that create a new namespace within the model layer or in the app itself:
src/Vendor
src/Model/Vendor
Have a factory that constructs and returns you the Vendor classes:
$vendorA = VendorFactory::get('SupplierA');
$vendorB = VendorFactory::get('SupplierB');
Each vendor class must implement a method fetchProducts(), use an interface or an abstract base class for that.
The method should return a normalized array that can be used to turn the products in entities:
$this->newEntities(VendorFactory::get('SupplierA')->fetchProducts());
You'll have a hard time determining the progress if there is no way to know the total amount of records. Which is likely when you scrape the website. Same issue applies when the API doesn't tell you the total amount of records per JSON data set. If you're able to get that total count somehow you can do this:
$this->newEntities(VendorFactory::get('SupplierA')->fetchProducts([
'limit' => 50,
'offset' => 0
]);
And implement pagination for the vendor which you can then use to run over all the records in a while() loop in chunks of X records. If you trigger that via shell you can create a "job" for that and update the progress after each chunk. There are multiple existing solutions for this kind of task already out there. Finally use Comet or Websockets to get the status updated on your website. Or the old way: Trigger an AJAX request every X seconds to check the status.
There is a lot more that could be said, but this is actually already a very broad question, there is very likely not enough detail to cover all cases. Also it might be possible (I'm pretty sure) there are different ways to solve this.

CakePHP 3 Entity Confusion

Here is the issue I am facing all the time since I started to learn CakePHP 3
What is this concept of entity a real world example would help alot.
public function add()
{
// why do we have to create new entity / what is the role of entity here.
$comment = $this->Comments->newEntity();
if ($this->request->is('post','put')) {
// why do we have to use this line after posting / what is the role of this line.
$comment = $this->Comments->patchEntity($comment,$this->request->data);
if ($this->Comments->save($comment)) {
$this->Flash->success('comment submitted successfully.');
} else {
$this->Flash->error('Sorry, comment could not be updated.');
}
}
return $this->redirect($this->referer());
}
Let me open the book for you:
While Table Objects represent and provide access to a collection of
objects, entities represent individual rows or domain objects in your
application. Entities contain persistent properties and methods to
manipulate and access the data they contain.
-
why do we have to create new entity / what is the role of entity here.
Almost everything, if not all, in Cake3 works with entities, what an entity is is explained above. You need to create a new entity so that the FormHelper can work with it, AFAIR it can still work with an array if configured to do so as well but the entity should be used.
The reason entities exist is to abstract the data. Some people think entities are the representation of a DB row - that's wrong. As the book says, they can be a row but don't have to represent a row because the 3.0 ORM can work with other resources as well. In theory you can have a CSV data source that returns an entity per line.
I suggest you to read the entity code in the CakePHP core to get a deeper understanding of what else entities provide, just saying they're "just" a set of properties is to short thought.
why do we have to use this line after posting / what is the role of this line.
The post data is merged into the previously created entity, that's it. Use the API if you have basic questions like that. See the API entry for patchEntity().
In simple word, Entity is a set of one record of table and their relational table, on that you can perform operation without touch of database and encapsulate property of entity (fields of table) as you want.
Advantages of Entity.
Modifying result sets outside of the database (for formatting or otherwise)
Needing to represent both the table and row in the same class.
Data validation was a fucking nightmare.
Inconsistent API in terms of both how we handled things internally as well as what (and how) we returned stuff.
Other random stuff as you want.
You can do run-time modification of result sets. Just add a method to your entity to return results in the way you want. This also means you can use composition for managing entities (yaya traits)
Validation is beautiful. We can validate data before it gets into an object and then validate the object state in a separate step.
It is easier for developers to understand what they are dealing with. You either have an object or an array of objects. An object can be linked to data which can also include other objects, but you no longer have to guess at what the array key will be, nor whether its nested funkily.
We can iterate on the interface for tables and entities separately. We couldn't easily change internals for the old Model class because of the implications on both, whereas now we can (in theory) change one without mucking about in the other.
It looks prettier simple.
Try this:
if ($this->request->is('post','put')) {
$data = $this->request->getData();
$comment = $this->Comments->newEntity();
$comment = $this->Comments->patchEntity($comment, $data);
$status = $this->Comments->save($comment);
if ($status) {
$this->Flash->success('comment submitted successfully.');
} else {
$this->Flash->error('Sorry, comment could not be updated.');
}
}
return $this->redirect($this->referer());
}
My advice is never use Post and Put in the same function. Just for good pratice. Put works fine when you make a update using id like a parameter.

How to delete a column (attribute) from a GAE datastore?

I have a persistent class stored in a GAE datastore. I have removed one of the attributes from the class. The new records in this table show a value <none> for the removed attribute. But is there a way I can completely drop this column off the table?
Thanks.
Added the following 'migration' code according to moraes' suggestion, but it isn't achieving the desired result:
PersistenceManager pm = PMF.get().getPersistenceManager();
try {
Query q = pm.newQuery(UserLogin.class);
Collection<UserLogin> list = (Collection<UserLogin>) q.execute();
Iterator<UserLogin> iter = list.iterator();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
UserLogin obj = (UserLogin) iter.next();
obj.setLoginDate(obj.getLoginDate());
}
pm.makePersistentAll(list);
} finally {
pm.close();
}
I found the answer to this problem in this Article:
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/update_schema.html
"Removing Deleted Properties from the Datastore
If you remove a property from your model, you will find that existing entities still have the property. It will still be shown in the admin console and will still be present in the datastore. To really clean out the old data, you need to cycle through your entities and remove the data from each one.
Make sure you have removed the properties from the model definition.
If your model class inherits from db.Model, temporarily switch it to inherit from db.Expando. (db.Model instances can't be modified dynamically, which is what we need to do in the next step.)
Cycle through existing entities (like described above). For each entity, use delattr to delete the obsolete property and then save the entity.
If your model originally inherited from db.Model, don't forget to change it back after updating all the data."
And here is an example with code:
http://sandrylogan.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/delattr/
If you are using ndb (and you probably should), you can easily delete properties by deleting them from entity._properties:
for entity in MyModel.query():
if 'old_property' in entity._values:
del entity._properties['old_property']
del entity._values['old_property']
entity.put()
Or you could make it faster by using an asynchronous query map:
#ndb.tasklet
def cleanup(entity):
if 'old_property' in entity._values:
del entity._properties['old_property']
del entity._values['old_property']
yield entity.put_async()
MyModel.query().map(cleanup)
There is no concept of "table" in datastore. Each entity can have arbitrary properties that don't follow a common schema. The only "schema" is in your model code, and existing records don't change automatically when you change your models.
So, to delete the property from existing records, you need to iterate over all records and re-save them without the property.
The datastore viewer gets its list of columns from the datastore stats, which are updated on a regular basis. If you've removed that column from every entity that had it, wait a day or two and the datastore viewer will stop showing it.

Silverlight / .NET RIA Services - Exposing a custom property to the client

I have a table in my database called "Task". Task has the following fields:
- ID
- Description
- AssignedUserID
- TaskTypeID
I am accessing this table through a class that was created automatically after I used an ADO.NET Entity Data Model. I can load and show the fields mentioned above in a DataGrid in my Silverlight application. However, AssignedUserID and TaskTypeID are not very descriptive. So I decided to create a stored procedure that gets the tasks and the user and task type names through their respective lookup tables. This is where the problem lies.
I want to create some custom properties in the automatically generated "Task" class. The custom properties would be named "AssignedUserName" and "TaskType". I then want to make these properties available to my Silverlight client. However, I cannot seem to figure out how to get them exposed to my Silverlight client.
Can someone help?
Thank you
If your EDM is in the same project as the DomainService you can do this:
create a partial class on the Entity type, and add your calculated property in there.
name the file **.shared.cs
it will then be auto-shared with the client/Silverlight code.
Edit:
I was assuming that you could do this calculation in app logic rather than use an sp, which seems more straightforward to me.
If you do use an SP, you'll need to use the Function Import feature in the designer to map the SP to a function in the EDM. This function can then return entities, with properties mapped however you like.
An easier way would be to just use the object model: Have Task.AssignedUser and Task.TaskType objects off of your Task class. Map these to lookup tables in your db. This will work out-of-the box (assuming the Id's are FK's to those lookup tables).
So, a couple options:
use app-logic--properties in a partial class to return the descriptions
use the object model driven by FKs to lookup tables, then just access Task.AssignedUser.Name or Task.TaskType.Description
use a function import to access the SP and map the returned values to entity properties
1 or 2 being the best options IMHO.
Another approach might be to update your EF model to include the lookup tables, add Associations between the tables, add [Include]s in the (auto-gen'd) metadata class and let EF and RIA do it for you. Maybe.

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