What is appropriate way of creating objects with One-to-Many relationship using Objectify and RequestFactory?

Question

What is appropriate way of creating objects with One-to-Many relationship using Objectify and RequestFactory? I've read documentation for these libraries, and also reviewed number of sample projects such as listwidget and gwtgae2011. All of them use @Embedded annotation which is not what I want because it stores everything within one entity. Another option according to documentation would be to use @Parent property in child classes. In my example (getters/setters removed for simplicity) I have entities Person and Organization which defined as

@Entity
public class Person extends DatastoreObject
{
    private String name;
    private String phoneNumber;
    private String email;
    @Parent private Key<Organization> organizationKey;
}

and

@Entity
public class Organization extends DatastoreObject
{
    private String name;
    private List<Person> contactPeople;
    private String address;
}

Now if I understood documentation correctly in order to persist Organization with one Person I have to persist Organization first, then set organizationKey to ObjectifyService.factory().getKey(organization) for Person object and then persist it. I already don't like that I have to iterate through every child object manually but using RequestFactory makes everything is more convoluted due to presence of proxy classes. How would I define Organization and OrganizationProxy classes - with Key<> or without it ? Will I have to define something like this in Organization ?

public void setContactPeople(List<Person> contactPeople)
{
    for (int i = 0; i < contactPeople.size(); ++i)
    {
        DAOBase dao = new DAOBase();
        Key<Organization> key = dao.ofy().put(this);
        contactPeople.get(i).setOrganizationKey(key);
    }
    this.contactPeople = contactPeople;
}

And how would I load Organization with its children from Datastore ? Will I have to manually fetch every Person and fill out Organization.contactPeople in @PostLoad method ?

It seems like I'll have to write A LOT of maintenance code just to do what JPA/JDO does behind the scene. I simply don't get it :(

Am I missing something or it's the only way to implement it ?

Thanks a lot for answers in advance!!!

Answer 1

You need to make it as @Parent only when you going to use it in transaction against all Person in this Organization. I'm sure it's not what you want.

It's enough to save just private Key<Organization> organizationKey, and filter by this field when you need to find Person for specified Organization

As about loading all referenced objects - yes, it is, you have to load it manually. It's pita, but it's not a lot of code.

Also, there is a different way to store this relationship, if your organization are small enough, and consists of few hundreds of people. At this case you can have List<Key<Person>> contactPeopleKey;, and load all this people by existing Key, manually, it much be much faster than loading by new Query