As the title suggests, in Quick, if you try to instantiate a new entity and that entity has a relationship, if you try to get a memento of the entity that includes the relationship, you will get an exception.
Here’s a quick example (pun intended):
// Post.cfc
component
extends="quick.models.BaseEntity"
accessors="true"
{
// Post belongs to an Author
function author() {
return belongsTo( "User" );
}
}
// Posts.cfc Handler
function index( event, rc, prc ) {
// Get an existing entity, or return a new one if not found
prc.post = getInstance( "Post" )
.firstOrCreate( rc.id );
// return the memento
return prc.post.getMemento( "author" );
}
My question is, why throw an error in this scenario? I feel like it would be more intuitive and useful to return null in the author key of the memento just like if you tried to call getAuthor() on a loaded entity that didn’t have an Author attached yet.
Throwing an error is still appropriate if the app attempts to attach an Author to a Post when Post hasn’t been saved yet. However, grabbing the memento, or trying to retrieve the Author from a non-loaded Post smells funny to me and makes it more difficult when developing functionality that may use a loaded or non-loaded entity, like when using the null object pattern.
What do you think?
