Thursday, October 23, 2008
Non-Key Auto-Increment Fields
Here's a small Milos feature addition that could be of interest to some people: We now support auto-increment fields that aren't key fields. In the past, we only supported such fields when they were in fact key fields (and there is quite a bit of functionality Milos has specific to that). In the latest version, such fields can be any field in the database.
Note that it only makes sense to expose such fields as read-only properties in business entities. Also, there is some additional work that needs to be done on the side of the developer to pick up the newest values generated by the database whenever such data gets saved the first time. (And of course, there is some overhead in database access and round trips that should not be underestimated).
Also, be aware that we do NOT recommend using this feature whenever the incremental field is used for business logic. Business logic belongs in the middle tier and not the database.
So this is a feature that may be valuable but it also should be deployed somewhat carefully. But there you have it: It's now supported.
Posted @ 4:43 PM by Egger, Markus (markus@code-magazine.com)