Generated Functions for Entities

For defined entities, a number of global functions are automatically generated. Replace Entity with the defined entity name below.

Property with id annotation

If the Entity has an id annotation on a property, the following functions are generated (idtype is the type of the id property):

getUniqueEntity

getUniqueEntity(id : idtype) : Entity

If the Entity with the given id already exists, it is returned. If it did not exist, it is created once and a flush to the database is performed (this will commit any changes made to the entities in memory, e.g. the changes from data binding of input fields), repeated calls to this function with the same argument will keep returning that created Entity.

isUniqueEntity

isUniqueEntity(ent : Entity) : Bool

This function returns false when the value of the id property of ent is already taken. The function returns true when the id property is not taken, but will do so only once, subsequent calls with different entities but the same id will then return false (which makes this function suitable for processing a batch of entities in an action).

isUniqueEntityId

isUniqueEntityId(id : idtype, ent : Entity) : Bool

This function returns false when the entity would not be unique when given the id argument. The function returns true when the entity would be unique, but will do so only once for a given id, checking a different entity with the same id will return false in the rest of the action handling.

isUniqueEntityId(id : idtype) : Bool

This function returns false when the given id is not available for the Entity type. The function will return true only once, to cope with batch processing.

Note that these functions use one collection per entity to determine whether an id is available, so a call to isUniqueUserId(id) can influence the result of isUniqueUser(ent).

findEntity

findEntity(id : idtype) : Entity

This function returns the Entity with the given id value, null if it does not exist.

String property

For each String property in an Entity, a find function is generated (repace Property with the property name):

findEntityByProperty

findEntityByProperty(val : String) : List<Entity>

This function returns a list of all Entitys with the exact given Property value, an empty list if there are none.

findEntityByPropertyLike

findEntityByPropertyLike(val : String) : List<Entity>

This function returns a list of all Entitys with the given Property value as substring, an empty list if there are none.

Entity Name

Every entity has a name, which is always a string. This name can be retrieved by the automatically generated getName() function.

The name of an entity is determined as follows:

1. If a property of the entity has the name annotation, the name of the entity equals this property. This property must be of type String.

2. If a property of the entity is called 'name' and is of type String, this property determines the entity name.

3. Otherwise, the id of the entity (converted to its string-value) is used.

Example

A typical scenario where these functions come in handy is a create/edit page for an entity. In the following example the isUniquePage function is used to verify that the new page has a unique identifier property:

entity Page {
  identifier :: String  (id, validate(isUniquePage(this), "Identifier is taken")
}
define page createPage(){ 
  var p := Page{}
  form{
    label("Identifier"){input(p.identifier)}
    action("save",save())
    action save(){
      p.save();
      message("New page created.");
      return home();
    }
  }  
}