Hi folks,

We've been building up a distributed data store that has a BDB at each leaf node. There are a few layers that our objects go through, and up until now we've been able to use our Entity objects directly throughout the code. They get serialized by RMI and make their way to our BDB nodes and get persisted by the DPL.

But now we have a situation where we have a field that we want serialized (non-transient) so that it makes its way all the way through our system, but then not persistent when it reaches the DPL. (We also have a search index at each leaf, and this bit of data includes some instructions for the search engine.)

The best solution (from my perspective!) would be simply to have an @NonPersistent annotation to make the DPL ignore a particular field. Lacking that, I came up with a couple options, neither of which I like. First, I could add a wrapper object that isn't an Entity class that contains my non-persistent data. I don't really like this idea, but it could work (makes all my objects a little larger and they get serialized a LOT). Second, I could modify readObject and writeObject to manually throw in the transient fields that I wanted to keep around. I don't really like that either (for different reasons), but it also could work.

Any other thoughts? Is there anything I'm missing that would allow me to do this easily?

Thanks!
Jeff

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the response. For the time being, I've modified writeObject and readObject to include the data that I want. This seems to work reasonable well. I'll be very happy to change it to use an @NonPersistent annotation if it works out. And you're absolutely right -- somebody might want to persist a transient member (although I would suspect that this is the less frequent case).

Thanks again,
Jeff