Grouper Developers Forum

[Chris Hyzer <>]

Hey,

Gary and I were discussing how the Grouper data layer works.

Currently it is a business object (e.g. Group) which talks to (and delegates 
to) a DTO bean (e.g. GroupDTO), which talks to and lazily delegates to a DAO 
bean (e.g. GroupDAO interface which is implemented by Hib3GroupDAO).

In doing hooks, there are some complications with this approach:

1. different hooks have access to different object layers, and not all object 
layers have references to each other
2. when doing things like getting diffs of what has changed, the DB state of 
the object needs to be stored, but this is in the DAO at the time of 
Hibernate, and that particular DAO is not kept around, another is created 
when needed again, so the DB state needs to be propagated:  DAO -> DTO -> 
Business object -> DTO -> DAO

Needless to say I am trying to simplify a little bit.

My idea was to cut out a layer or two.  This would be a decent amount of 
(re)work.  Gary's idea is to take the bean part out of the DAO, and make it a 
singleton which is only responsible for data access queries (which return 
DTO's).  The DTO's would hold the state of the object.

I checked it out briefly, and Gary's idea would not require a lot of code 
changes, and would simplify things, so I agree this is how we should proceed.

I will do this and see how it goes.  Let me know asap if anyone disagrees or 
would like to discuss.  These objects weren't public before and they are an 
implementation detail, else I would wait for a call, but thought I would 
mention it on the list.  :)

Thanks,
Chris