ExcludeAction implementation wrong for many-to-many relations

Support
#1

Hi
I have a combined browse-edit screen to edit an entity that has a many-to-many relation to another entity. The edited entity is the owning side, so it should be ok adding/excluding items from the association.

So Studio added automatically a table to add/exclude items from the association collection. But ExcludeAction doesn’t work as expected, it simply doesn’t set the modified state of the CollectionDatasource attached to the table (so the commit is a no-op if you don’t change other properties of edited entity, because modified=false).

The wrong code is in the doRemove method, and in particular this loop:


for (Object item : selected) {
    ds.excludeItem((Entity) item);
}

I have overridden the method in a custom action, and replaced with a call to removeItem, and now it works as expected.

In addition, at the beginning of the same method (doRemove) I think that you have missed a check in this condition

if (inverseProp != null) {

, you should also check that

!inverseProp.getRange().getCardinality().isMany()

Thanks,
Paolo

#2

UPDATE:
After some attempts, this is what I found:

  • ExcludeAction is basically used only for ONE-TO-MANY associations, and doesn’t work reliably for anything else
  • RemoveAction works for plain entity removals (aka DELETEs), and for MANY-TO-MANY associations but only on the owning side. It doesn’t work on the mappedBy side of the association.
  • AddAction work for associations, but it doesn’t work on the mappedBy side (non-owning side) of a MANY-TO-MANY association
    My test users are confused by this exclude/remove differentiation for the associations, it is too much a technical detail for them. They like to have a consistently named button, and for me it is Remove for deleting records, and Exclude from deleting associations.
    And they like to be able to remove a MANY-TO-MANY association on both sides of the relation, something that could not be achieved by standard actions.
    For the above reasons I replaced the standard AddAction and ExcludeAction to deal with these points:
  • ExtAddAction can add from both sides of a MANY-TO-MANY association (by creating a hidden datasource and adding to the other side collection)
  • ExtExcludeAction deal with any type of association, and on both sides of MANY-TO-MANY associations. Now I can use Exclude consistently for all associations, while Remove only for deleting entities.
    If anyone else is interested in these new actions, I’ll post them somewhere.
    Regards,
    Paolo
#3

Hi.

The issue is known. We are going to fix it some day.

Thank you.

#4

ExcludeAction behaviour has been fixed in issue: https://youtrack.cuba-platform.com/issue/PL-7515 Fix will be available since Release 6.6

#5

:ticket: See the following issue in our bug tracker:

https://youtrack.cuba-platform.com/issue/PL-9275