Details
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Bug
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Status: Closed
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Major
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Resolution: Fixed
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JDO 2 rc1
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None
Description
Completeness tests fail while comparing collections of persistent interfaces. This is because EqualityHelper invokes Collections.sort(Collection), which requires that the instances in the parameter Collection implement compareTo. The instances are not required by the specification to implement compareTo; therefore a Comparator must be provided to the sort method.
Further, classes Department and FullTimeEmployee incorrectly cast to the class instead of the interface in the deepCompareFields method.
Finally, the root classes Address, Company, Department, Insurance, Person, and Project need to implement the compare(Object, Object) methods directly, as there are three instances involved: the Comparator instance, which is an instance of the class, and the two instances to be compared. Both of the instances to be compared might be of the JDO-generated classes, which don't implement any comparison methods. The compare(Object, Object), compareTo(Object), and compareTo(SpecificInterface) should be refactored to use a common implementation using only the interface for comparison.
As a specification activity beyond JDO 2.0, we might consider adding metadata to require the JDO implementation to generate comparison methods from the Comparable or Comparator interfaces based on field values. For datastore identity, simply tagging the interfaces, e.g. "interface IDepartment extends Comparable", doesn't give the implementation enough information as to which fields to compare.