Repated double properties for nested entities

[jmakeig]

An entity with a sub-entity of type "person" where that sub-entity is also called "person" results in a duplicate name in the XML like:

<envelope>
 <person>
    <person>
     <name>bob</name>
     <age>33</age>
    </person>
  </person>
</envelope>

The extra level of indirection is particularly odd (and appears to users to be a bug) when the reference and the sub-entity have the same name, resulting in an element being doubled.

[jmakeig]

From RFE4043.

[grechaw]

Entities have properties, and the type of a property can be an entity.

This example doesn't follow that convention. It's a different way of grouping documents, more like XML modeling.

So what is the action one might take for this issue? It's not a bug, just a statement.

The convention of entity types being Uppercase and property names being lowerCase helps to distinguish among them

[jmakeig]

I’m not sure I understand the original issue or your analysis, @grechaw. @damonfeldman can you please weigh in?

[grechaw]

Let me put it this way-- what model created this envelope? As is, entity services cannot make it. The original issue Michael Doane came up with had a notion of an entity ( ~element) which contains other entities. Containment or 'sub-entities' is not something that entity services does at this time.

[damonfeldman]

This may be data from an augmentation in the data hub framework. Perhaps @paxtonhare can weigh in. I would say this is an RFE around having ES specify documents with a particular structure. If I understand correctly, a feature for nested entities is planned already?

[jmakeig]

Yes, #266 describes sub-entities. We should also think about serialization strategies, such as which (and how) to denormalize related entities (or even sub-entities) or how to handle elements vs. attributes, one-to-many (e.g. pluralized parent element in XML, Array wrappers on single items in JSON, etc.). What else?

I don’t want to give too much artistic license on serialization. If done correctly, long-term, the physical structures are mostly implementation details. The high-order bit is the instance of the model, not how it’s represented in a document.

[sparnell]

If I'm following this discussion correctly, it seems that the position is that there's no way to express an entity with a sub-entity property that doesn't result in the extra level of markup when serialized to XML. If that's correct, then I'll second Justin's original comment that this is seen as a bug by users. In fact, I'm commenting on this because I was asked by a customer's developer to file a bug report against this behavior.