voyage mongo and transactionality

On Oct 8, 2019, at 5:24 AM, Kasper Østerbye <[hidden email]> wrote:

Cheers,

Have there been any problems with running Pharo on the new MacOS Catelina (10.15)?

On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved.

Here is what I don’t understand: how did the change get from the user’s client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isn’t cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser?

James

I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless.

So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet.

Joachim

Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster:

Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what you’ve described, I don’t see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern.

James

On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James,

I see how my explanation might be unclear.

We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is not clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated.

So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. 

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild
[hidden email]

On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <[hidden email]>, wrote:

On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved.

Here is what I don’t understand: how did the change get from the user’s client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isn’t cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser?

James

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Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel          [hidden email]
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Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0         Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

Hi,

Am 08.10.2019 um 12:05 schrieb Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]>:

Hello all,

We are having some issues with using Voyage/Mongo for a customer project that I'd like to get your feedback on.

The customer application is a form based business web application using Seaside with object persistence using Voyage with MongoDB on Pharo 7.0. The application is deployed on a dedicated Linux production server running MongoDB version 4.2.

The application is used to manage meeting agendas and minutes. After opening the agenda view of a future meeting, the user can add an item to the agenda by clicking a button. This calls an item editor component which answers when a Save or Cancel button is clicked. The agenda view component itself also has a Save button, which performs a Voyage save of the object aggregate (agenda + items).

We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved.

It does not matter if we select the agenda aggregate object instance using Voyage or access it in a different way. Changes to the state of the object are retained, even though a Voyage save was never sent to the agenda instance. The cause seems to be that the Voyage repository caches the object instance and thus on select, it returns an object that is in a different state than how it was persisted.

This all seems to come down to object transactionality.

We have a need to 'cancel' changes made to an object instance. Before working with Pharo/Smalltalk in a non-image based environment, I was used to do this by retrieving the original object from persistence again. This also allowed for a convenient way to detect changes to an object's state, which we are missing at the moment too.

We know that moving to GemStone can help us with these issues, but our current planning of customer projects does not allow us to do this within the next 3 months. And we really need to find a way to tackle these issues .


Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

this is none to be confusing to a lot of people. If you map a memory object graph to a database there are no intrinsic points of transactions unless you put them into your application model. Gemstone or any transaction based handling won‘t help you if your use case is not as coarse grained as discarding all modified data and not just some. Or you need to hop into nested transactions which are supported by Gemstone IMHO but there is rules to care about, too, if you want to use them.

Regarding your application you modify data and this is kept. The cache in mongo is a weak dictionary. This means that if you get the object with the changes a second time it means these objects are referenced somewhere. Seaside sessions seems to be the obvious thing here. If you have a reachable object (e.g. server singleton -> handler -> seaside -> seaside session -> business object) then mongo keeps the object in its cache because it needs to be able to establish identity on further queries. Ein emoving all the changes from an object you keep in memory wouldn‘t be really good if the persistence layer would do it.

The problem is obvious but the solution is not. We could make the cache session or request based which would circumvent the problem. But if an object would be attached to something outside the session/request which you cannot forbid it causes real problems like multiple copies to an identical object.

I don‘t know what you mean with object transactionality because it makes no sense in my head. But you have basically two approaches to solve the problem. If you would use magritte you would have it at hand. There each UI component gets just a memento of the business object for modification. You need to commit the UI component in order to modify the business object. So you can commit on user interaction and separately on persistence which allows a huge set of use cases.
The other one I‘m working on since a while is a proper modification tracking. In this you change the objects directly but have a registry with the dirty objects which you can act upon. I have a sample modification tracker that uses readOnly object write barrier for objects. On write attempt it registers the object and the write operation as command pattern. You can undo modifications of a single object where all commmands are undone on that object. Or you abort all modifications at once. It is basically working but has the problems on concurrent access. As the mongo cache is image wide two concurrent requests interfere with each other.
So you can see that the problem is not that easy to solve.

TL;DR a memento approach might your best and cleanest option right now.

Norbert

Kind regards,


Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild
[hidden email]

Hi,

That looks a lot more like a Seaside mishandling than a problem with Voyage itself.

On 8 Oct 2019, at 12:05, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello all,

We are having some issues with using Voyage/Mongo for a customer project that I'd like to get your feedback on.

The customer application is a form based business web application using Seaside with object persistence using Voyage with MongoDB on Pharo 7.0. The application is deployed on a dedicated Linux production server running MongoDB version 4.2.

The application is used to manage meeting agendas and minutes. After opening the agenda view of a future meeting, the user can add an item to the agenda by clicking a button. This calls an item editor component which answers when a Save or Cancel button is clicked. The agenda view component itself also has a Save button, which performs a Voyage save of the object aggregate (agenda + items).

We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved.

It does not matter if we select the agenda aggregate object instance using Voyage or access it in a different way. Changes to the state of the object are retained, even though a Voyage save was never sent to the agenda instance. The cause seems to be that the Voyage repository caches the object instance and thus on select, it returns an object that is in a different state than how it was persisted.

This all seems to come down to object transactionality.

We have a need to 'cancel' changes made to an object instance. Before working with Pharo/Smalltalk in a non-image based environment, I was used to do this by retrieving the original object from persistence again. This also allowed for a convenient way to detect changes to an object's state, which we are missing at the moment too.

In Voyage, new objects are just persisted (hence they enter the cache) once you do the first “save”.
Retrieved objects are indeed in the cache, and since there is just one copy for Pharo instance, if you do an update of a property (even if you do not save), the cached instance will have the new attribute value, since there is no in-memory transaction handling in Voyage.

Which means: you need to handle it by your self. One solution is to work on a copy and on “save” flush the changes before (it is easy to develop methods to automatise this).

Well, something like that :)

We know that moving to GemStone can help us with these issues, but our current planning of customer projects does not allow us to do this within the next 3 months. And we really need to find a way to tackle these issues .

Well, not really, you will still need to copy modified values, retrieve new and apply your changes.
Of course if you want to discard possible in-memory changes, yes, you can cancel the transaction in gemstone… and you can also re-read the object in Voyage (no special api for that, even if we could add it… you need to re-execute a query for it).

Esteban

Your feedback is greatly appreciated!



Kind regards,


Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild
[hidden email]

Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what you’ve described, I don’t see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern.

James

On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James,

I see how my explanation might be unclear.

We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is not clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated.

So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. 

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild
[hidden email]

On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <[hidden email]>, wrote:

On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved.

Here is what I don’t understand: how did the change get from the user’s client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isn’t cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser?

James

This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of object-level transaction framework that automatically creates mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But this is not trivial for general cases.

In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic...

I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless.

So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet.

Joachim

Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster:

Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what you’ve described, I don’t see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern.

James

On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James,

I see how my explanation might be unclear.

We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is not clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated.

So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. 

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild
[hidden email]

On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <[hidden email]>, wrote:

On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved.

Here is what I don’t understand: how did the change get from the user’s client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isn’t cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser?

James

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Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel          [hidden email]
Fliederweg 1                         http://www.objektfabrik.de
D-71640 Ludwigsburg                  http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com
Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0         Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

Am 09.10.2019 um 16:48 schrieb "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>:

This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of object-level transaction framework that automatically creates mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But this is not trivial for general cases.

Yes it is tricky. You can have copies of business objects but you have always references to the business objects not pointing to the copy. 

And you need to know which objects should be tracked. In Gemstone IIRC it is easy as it is the time the object is copied from the stone to the gem it is registered in the current transaction. So you can check it and committing if it changed because you have to write it back. The important point here might be get noticed when a reference is acquired. In pharo it is not that easy but could be done if object would be reified and interceptable. 

In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic...

70% + 60% + 25% + 30% = 185%

sounds indeed very realistic if it comes to project planning. 😛There is even a rule saying that for the first 90% of the project you need the first 90% of time and for the last 10% of the project you need the second 90% of time. 

I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless.

So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet.

I think it isn‘t solved and I find every piece of information about it very interesting.

Norbert

Joachim

Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster:

Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what you’ve described, I don’t see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern.

James

On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James,

I see how my explanation might be unclear.

We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is not clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated.

So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. 

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild
[hidden email]

On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <[hidden email]>, wrote:

On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved.

Here is what I don’t understand: how did the change get from the user’s client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isn’t cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser?

James

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Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel          [hidden email]
Fliederweg 1                         http://www.objektfabrik.de
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Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0         Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

It may be irrelevant, but I have been playing recently with OmniBase, which is a fully object-oriented database system, now over 20 years old, but it still works very well for my uses. David Gorišek, the author, claims that it has ACID properties. From my reading, updates operate on a proxy object, which is not written to the database until an explicit commit is given. A second transaction accessing the same object will still see the original until the change is committed. What happens to a proxy which is never committed is not clear, but if Gorišek is right, the stored data can never be contaminated. I think a proxy in this sense is equivalent to a memento.

 

Thanks to Esteban Lorenzano, OmniBase is now available on Pharo. The code is ancient, there is no documentation and obviously no support, but it might be worth while for someone to try some software archaeology and put it to use. I have found it possible to create and maintain a small database of natural language information, and access is fairly quick and easy – and it’s all Smalltalk.

It claims to store all kinds of Smalltalk objects, except block closures, and skimming through the code it seems to incorporate a serializer similar to Fuel.

 

The only documentation I have found is a slideshow at https://www.slideshare.net/esug/omni-baseobjectdatabase. I have found out a few things about it, if anyone is interested.

 

Peter Kenny

 

 

From: Pharo-users <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Norbert Hartl
Sent: 09 October 2019 18:08
To: Any question about pharo is welcome <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] voyage mongo and transactionality

 

 

Am 09.10.2019 um 16:48 schrieb "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>:

 

This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of object-level transaction framework that automatically creates mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But this is not trivial for general cases.

 

Yes it is tricky. You can have copies of business objects but you have always references to the business objects not pointing to the copy. 

And you need to know which objects should be tracked. In Gemstone IIRC it is easy as it is the time the object is copied from the stone to the gem it is registered in the current transaction. So you can check it and committing if it changed because you have to write it back. The important point here might be get noticed when a reference is acquired. In pharo it is not that easy but could be done if object would be reified and interceptable. 

In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic...

70% + 60% + 25% + 30% = 185%

 

sounds indeed very realistic if it comes to project planning. 😛There is even a rule saying that for the first 90% of the project you need the first 90% of time and for the last 10% of the project you need the second 90% of time. 

I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless.

So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet.

I think it isn‘t solved and I find every piece of information about it very interesting.

 

Norbert

Joachim

 

 

 

 

 

 

Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster:

Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what you’ve described, I don’t see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern.

 

James

On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Hi James,

 

I see how my explanation might be unclear.

 

We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is not clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated.

 

So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. 

 

 

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild
[hidden email]

On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <[hidden email]>, wrote:

On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved.

Here is what I don’t understand: how did the change get from the user’s client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isn’t cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser?

James

 

 

-- 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Objektfabrik Joachim Tuchel          [hidden email]

Fliederweg 1                         http://www.objektfabrik.de

D-71640 Ludwigsburg                  http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com

Telefon: +49 7141 56 10 86 0         Fax: +49 7141 56 10 86 1

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild
[hidden email]

On 9 Oct 2019, 19:09 +0200, Norbert Hartl <[hidden email]>, wrote:

Am 09.10.2019 um 16:48 schrieb "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>:

This is a tricky mine field. Sometimes you need a lot of business functionality in objects referenced in your objects that are currently in the editor. So I'm still to see a project in which the memento pattern really worked for more complex scenarios. How deep do you dive to have enough memento objects to provide the functionality needed. I guess you can do that with some sort of object-level transaction framework that automatically creates mementos of whatever object is being navigated to during some kind of processing-context. I guess slots could be of use here. But this is not trivial for general cases.

Yes it is tricky. You can have copies of business objects but you have always references to the business objects not pointing to the copy. 

And you need to know which objects should be tracked. In Gemstone IIRC it is easy as it is the time the object is copied from the stone to the gem it is registered in the current transaction. So you can check it and committing if it changed because you have to write it back. The important point here might be get noticed when a reference is acquired. In pharo it is not that easy but could be done if object would be reified and interceptable. 

In my experience, this problem area makes for the other 70% of the time spent on developing GUI or Web applications, besides the 60% for GUI design and implementation and 25% business logic...

70% + 60% + 25% + 30% = 185%

sounds indeed very realistic if it comes to project planning. 😛There is even a rule saying that for the first 90% of the project you need the first 90% of time and for the last 10% of the project you need the second 90% of time. 

I'd be interested to learn about patterns to handle such more complex things. We constantly travel back and forth between implementing stuff in the GUI handlers (copying values to the GUI classes that access themselves during GUI operations and push values to the business objects when the users clicks on OK), using mementos (which most of the times are nets of mementos that are created manually - "we know what we'll touch in this Editor") and operating on business objects directly and relying on the persistence mechanism (Glorp in our case) and its rollback behaviour. All three have lots of weaknesses and seem to have their place nevertheless.

So this is a very interesting discussion and I think this is an area that has not been solved yet.

I think it isn‘t solved and I find every piece of information about it very interesting.

Norbert

Joachim

Am 09.10.19 um 16:25 schrieb James Foster:

Thanks for the explanation. And, yes, this is an artifact of your design; if you put intermediate values into domain objects then they will remain in your domain objects to be seen later. From what you’ve described, I don’t see how it would be any different in a non-image environment (Java, C#, etc.), unless you re-read the entire object graph from the database. As someone else mentioned, this would be a good place for the Memento Pattern.

James

On Oct 9, 2019, at 1:59 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James,

I see how my explanation might be unclear.

We have a main form for the agenda and a subform for an item, which is shown using Seaside call/answer. The save button of the subform is clicked, which adds the item to the underlying agenda model object, but the save button of the main form is not clicked by the user. The callback for the main save button sends the save message to the agenda object, causing the database to be updated.

So yes, the browser does submit the data on the subform, it's the main form component that doesn't receive the save button callback. I realize that this is in large part an issue with our design. However, the way object persistence seems to work in the image environment plays a large role. 

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild
[hidden email]

On 8 Oct 2019, 15:41 +0200, James Foster <[hidden email]>, wrote:

On Oct 8, 2019, at 3:05 AM, Jonathan van Alteren <[hidden email]> wrote:

We've encountered an issue where a user makes changes to an agenda, but does not click the Save button. Instead, the user closes the browser or uses the navigation to go to a different part of the application. When navigating back to the original agenda, the changes made previously (e.g. items added) are still being displayed, even though they were never explicitly saved.

Here is what I don’t understand: how did the change get from the user’s client agent (browser) to the server? If you make a change to a field in a form and then close the browser, who sent the change to the server? If you show the save domain value in a different location, with a dynamically-generated id and name (so it isn’t cached in the browser), or written to the Pharo Transcript, does the value still change? That is, are you sure that the change is in the reflected in the Smalltalk image and not just somehow cached in the browser?

James

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