https://bravenewgeek.com/tag/identity-map/Recent content in Identity Map on Brave New GeekHugoen-usSat, 01 Dec 2012 13:37:46 -0600https://bravenewgeek.com/solving-the-referential-integrity-problem/Sat, 01 Dec 2012 13:37:46 -0600https://bravenewgeek.com/solving-the-referential-integrity-problem/<p><em>“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”</em></p> <p>I’ve been developing my open source Android framework, <a href="http://code.google.com/p/infinitum-framework/">Infinitum</a>, for the better part of 10 months now. It has brought about some really interesting problems that I’ve had to tackle, which is one of the many reasons I enjoy working on it so much.</p> <h3 id="chicken-or-the-egg">Chicken or the Egg</h3> <p>Although it’s much more now, Infinitum began as an object-relational mapper which was loosely modeled after <a href="http://www.hibernate.org/">Hibernate</a>. One of the first major issues I faced while developing the ORM component was loading object graphs. To illustrate what I mean by this, suppose we’re developing some software for a department store. The domain model for this software might look something like this:</p>