Visual Basic —

Getting at the Recordset

As discussed earlier, sometimes it is more efficient to deal with the internal factory recordset directly rather than with the factory object. This is primarily true when dealing with distributed clients that do not have direct access to the worker objects themselves. In this case, the factory object exports this recordset through the Recordset property.

The Recordset property can also be used to regenerate a business object. Imagine a distributed client that has accessed an EmployeeDetails method on an action object and has received the corresponding recordset. The distributed client then shuts the action object down (because, as we will soon see, action objects are designed to be stateless). This recordset is then modified and sent back to the action object. The action object needs to perform some operations on the business objects that are currently represented by the recordset.

The action object can create an empty factory object and assign the recordset sent back from the client to this factory. Calling the Populate method will now result in a set of worker objects being regenerated from this recordset! Or, if the data has just been sent back to the database, the action object could call Persist without performing the Populate method at all, again maximizing performance when the client is modifying simple sets of data.

Take particular care when using the Recordset property with distributed clients, though. It's important to ensure that other clients don't modify the underlying business object after the business object has been serialized as a recordset. In such a case, you'll end up with two different recordsets-the recordset on the client and the recordset inside the business object. This situation can easily be avoided by ensuring that the action objects remain as stateless as possible. In practice, this means closing down the business object immediately after the recordset has been retrieved, thereby minimizing the chance of the business object changing while a copy of the recordset exists on the client.

Dim ocfEmployees     As New cfEmployees
  Dim ocParams         As New cParams
  Dim ocRecordset      As cRecordset
  Set ocfEmployees = New cfEmployees
  ocParams.Add "PostCode", "GL543HG"
  ocfEmployees.Create oPicDAL
  ocfEmployees.Populate ocParams
  Set ocRecordset = ocfEmployees.Recordset

Be aware that the above code is not recommended, except when you need to return sets of data to distributed clients. Data manipulation that is performed on the same tier as the factory objects should always be done by direct manipulation of the worker objects.