In an ordinary one-to-many mapping the "one"-side is the owner of the association. Why would anyone use the belongsTo-mapping for such a mapping? Am I missing some side-effect of specifying belongsTo?
In other words: what are the effects of specifying a belongsTo-mapping in GORM vs. not specifying it?
Whether to specify belongsTo depends upon the type of referential action you want.
If you want Grails to do On Delete, CASCADE referential action, then DO specify belongsTo. If you want Grails to do On Delete, RESTRICT referential action, then DON'T specify belongsTo.
e.g.
// "belongsTo" makes sense for me here.
class Country {
String name
static hasMany = [states:State]
}
class State {
String name;
// I want all states to be deleted when a country is deleted.
static belongsTo = Country
}
// Another example, belongsTo doesn't make sense here
class Team {
String name
static hasMany = [players:Player]
}
class Player {
String name
// I want that a team should not be allowed to be deleted if it has any players, so no "belongsTo" here.
}
Hope this helps.
Specifying belongsTo allows Grails to transparently cascade updates, saves and deletes to the object's children. Without belongsTo, if you attempt to delete a master record, you'll end up getting a foreign key violation if it has any details it owns.
Related
What is the different in GORM between
class Books {
Author author
}
and
class Books {
static belongsTo = [author: Author]
}
Does cascading rules changes in these two approaches? Also, when to use belongsTo and more importantly, when not to use belongsTo in Grails ?
Yes, belongsTo is intended for controlling cascades of saves and deletes. You may reference the full documentation here http://docs.grails.org/latest/ref/Domain%20Classes/belongsTo.html but to summarize (and in case the URL dies someday):
Use belongsTo to indicate ownership. Saves or deletes to the parent will cascade to the child. In your example, if the Author is deleted, his Books will be too (assuming Author hasMany Books
Do not use belongsTo if you just want to indicate a relationship with no ownership on either side and no automatic cascading of saves or deletes.
While migrating an existing app from Grails 2.5 to 3.1, I ran into an odd issue with a bi-directional one-to-one relationship.
Imagine a simple model with a User and Employee objects. A User represents a generic user account. Not all users are Employees but all Employees are Users. Moreover Employees have references to managers, supervisors, etc (also User instances). User is the owning side of the relationship.
class User {
Employee employee
static mappedBy = [employee: "user"]
static hasOne = [employee: Employee]
static constraints = {
employee(nullable:true)
}
}
class Employee {
User user // represents employee's own account, a bi-directional one-to-one
User supervisor // represents a supervisor
static belongsTo = [user: User]
static constraints = {
user(unique:true)
supervisor(nullable:true)
}
}
The trouble after upgrading to Grails 3 is that in the create mode, this results in supervisor_id column of employee table being generated as NOT NULL, whereas in Grails 2 it was nullable as expected (with only user_id being NOT NULL).
I tested this with Grails 3.1.12 and 3.2.0, getting the same behavior with both. Am I doing anything stupid in my domain class declarations? I've tried multiple mappings to achieve the same behavior as in Grails 2.5 without luck. In some cases I'm even getting a foreign key on both sides of the relationship...
I don't know why your code was working with previous version of Grails, but it is wrong.
When you use hasMany and belongsTo, it is not necessary to define other property in the child object, and you don't need also to use the mappedBy property on the parent, and the same with the parent (property employee at User)
Grails doesn't need anything else to know which is the bidirectional property on both classes, and the constraint user(unique : true) neither.
So your classes should look like this:
class User {
static hasOne = [employee: Employee]
static constraints = {
employee(nullable: true)
}
}
class Employee {
User supervisor // represents a supervisor
static belongsTo = [user: User]
static constraints = {
supervisor(nullable:true)
}
}
It could be nice to know how is your DB structure. But in this way all foreign keys are stored in the employee table. But of course you could navigate from both entities. If you have different structure you could map your current database with this model. See this
employee.user
user.employee
Is it possible to map the following with GORM?
I want to get rid off all associated events when I delete a person.
Person object should not have a link to events.( I want to avoid using hasMany on Person domain)
class Person {
String username
}
class Event {
String description
static belongsTo = [person:Person]
}
I'm getting now a 'Referential integrity constraint violation' when doing person.delete() because events are not removed before deleting person.
I don't think that is possible without using hasMany (speaking of which, why do you want to avoid that anyway?)
This SO Question states:
Hibernate only cascades along the defined associations. If A knows
nothing about Bs, nothing you do with A will affect Bs.
Use static hasMany and bam, problem fixed.
Edit:
The only way I think you could achieve this is using beforeDelete on the Person class to delete all the associated Events, i.e.
class Person {
def beforeDelete() {
def events = Event.findAllByPerson(this)
for (e in events) {
e.delete()
}
}
}
See the documentation on Events and Auto Timestamping for more info on that.
The above will not work
Why not define a no reference mapping:
class Person {
String username
static hasMany=[Events]
}
This way there is no actual bindings of events to person but a person can have many events
In my domain I have a many-to-many relationship. The problem is that GORM forces me to define owner entity but I don't think that either side "owns" the relation.
class User {
String username
String password
static hasMany = [organizations: Organization]
static belongsTo = Organization
static constraints = {
}
}
class Organization {
String name;
static hasMany = [members: User]
}
In this case I'm obviously not allowed to delete User who is in some organization (because Organization "owns" the relation). I would like to be able to delete both entities and on delete simply remove the relation (row from user_organization table). Is it possible or do I have to write this logic myself (if so, what would be the best way to implement this)?
You are allowed to delete both sides of the relationship, no matter who is the "owner". The belongsTo just applies the proper cascading so you don't have to.
In your example if you want to delete a user you first have to remove the relationship. So, in order to delete a user you do:
organization.removeFromMembers(user)
user.delete()
And if you delete an organization, since it is the "owner", you just don't need to use removeFrom*.
I have got a domain class Track
class Track{
static belongsTo = [createdBy: User, modifiedBy: User, Course]
}
But its giving me error, Finally i dont want to have course object[course: Course] but only have to specify that it belongs to Course [Course]. How to do this
I think you are using the GORM associations a bit too extensively. belongsTo indicates ownership, and the GORM associations, in general, indicate more about the cascading relationship between objects than anything else.
If you only want to associate User with your Track, you just need to have the createdBy and modifiedBy fields, which don't need to be in any special sort of association. Then you would have static belongsTo = [Course] to show that the Course owns the Track, meaning that if you deleted the Course, that the Track would get deleted as well.
Here's the class I think you are looking for:
class Track {
User createdBy
User modifiedBy
static belongsTo = [Course]
}