Rails - Aug 2005 - Re: utf-8 string return types in action web services AND association loading

On 8/11/05, Simen Brekken <simen-qaH4BmqzZooOvCyXmLEu7A@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> It''s been an uphill battle but I now have the definitive answer to
the
> life, the universe and everything - all neatly formatted in UTF-8:
Thanks for this, your struggles have been noted. 

I assume you were the person who filed the report on AWS not loading
AR associations? I have a draft patch that works for simple cases, but
will fall apart if you declare circular associations (i.e. go into a
loop).

Say you have:

class Customer
  has_many :accounts
end

class Account
  belongs_to :customer
end

When AWS now tries to walk the associations for serializing to a SOAP
representation, the following happens:

1. Have customer instance, see we need to get a list of accounts. Call
the "accounts" method to return them.

2. Have account instance, see we have an association for a single
:customer, call the "customer" method to retrieve it.

However, since the Customer instance returned in (2) is a different
instance, and AWS'' serialization is recursive to handle arbitrarily
nested structures, you see we''ll go into a loop.

Eager loading isn''t going to save us here.

So, what I was thinking, was to just rely on a Class:PK key to confer
identity for the purposes of serialization.

That way, we can keep track of "seen" records in a temporary graph
while serializing, and not travel items we''ve visited before.

Does this sound like a reasonable approach to you?

Regards
Leon