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RE: What is the right way of implementing simple User-entity link in CE 7.x

Dmitriy Kuznetsov, modified 6 Years ago.
What is the right way of implementing simple User-entity link in CE 7.x?
New Member Posts: 5 Join Date: 12/19/15 Recent Posts
Hi!

There is a simple CustomEntity in project. The entity is Asset-enabled. It's necessary to link the CustomEntity with Liferay User entity to create a User's wishlist.

Technically, it's a many-to-many relationship table between CustomEntity and User. Would be great if i can describe the relationship in services.xml like following:

<entity name="CustomEntity" local-service="true" remote-service="false" cache-enabled="false">

    <column name="id" type="long" primary="true" />

    <column name="wishedBy" type="Collection" entity="com.liferay.portal.kernel.model.User" mapping-table="User2CustomEntityWishList" />

</entity>
... but Service builder generates CustomEntityLocalServiceBaseImpl code expecting related methods(addCustomEntity(), removeCustomEntity(), etc.) in com.liferay.portal.kernel.service.persistence.UserPersistence class.  The code, of cource, is not compilable.

The idea of adding as little as a many-to-many table and couple of methods to CustomEntityService to lookup CustomEntities by User / User.id looks attractive. Would be great to utilize the system as much as possible. Is there a way to do this?

Alternatively, if none, can i avoid creating service(s) for wishlist and overbloating the many-to-many table with Status / Audit fields, finders, references, etc? How to implement it in the most simple and lighweight way?

Thanks,
Dmitriy
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Andrew Jardine, modified 6 Years ago.
RE: What is the right way of implementing simple User-entity link in CE 7.x
Liferay Legend Posts: 2416 Join Date: 12/22/10 Recent Posts
Hi Dimitriy,

I'm not entirely sure I am following but let's see. From what I understand you (of course) have a User table (Liferay provided as we all know) and then you have a WishList table which you have defined in service builder. And now you want to link the two -- and if I am understanding you correctly, I think the simplest answer is to have a 

User_WishList

mapping table (service builder entity). You can include just the userId and the wishListId to limit the number of columns, but I would only do that if I knew my Liferay install would only ever have one portal instance and one site. I understand that you wuld rather have 1000 users all wishing for the same item to be stored in a single row, but a you can see that's not as easy. The userId/wishListId would be unique though so you could define a finder in which case the looks ups would be super fast. 

You seem to be concerned about the potential size of the data (number of records) -- are you expecting a huge volume?