[ATLAS-2813] Atlas Entity: Support New Attribute 'SoftReference' for Referencing Without Edge

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.8.3
• Fix Version/s: 0.8.3, 1.2.0, 2.0.0
• Component/s: atlas-core
• Assignee: Ashutosh Mestry
• Reporter: Ashutosh Mestry
• Due: 10/Aug/18
• Created: 06/Aug/18 20:29
• Updated: 26/Sep/19 00:38
• Resolved: 17/Aug/18 05:27

Description

Background

Cases where types have attributes that reference other objects, existing implementation creates an edge between referencing object and referenced object.

It may be worthwhile to have this behavior enforced via an attribute.

Example within existing implementation, is the use of replicatedToCluster attribute. This forces every entity having this attribute set to create an edge to the AtlasCluster entity it is referring to.

Approach Guidance

• Define new attribute say softRefrence. This will be applied to attribute definition.
• When defined, the object Id is stored within the referring object similar to primitive types.
• When not defined, the types will continue to use current behavior, where edge is created between referring entity and the referred entity and the edge id is stored within the parent entity.