StrataFrame Forum

Question from potential SF User

http://forum.strataframe.net/Topic26576.aspx

By Charles R Hankey - 3/22/2010

An old friend from VFE days posted this on UT. Thought I'd collect answers for him here :





>I am just beginning to investigate Strataframe and I have a specific question. I would appreciate an answer from anyone who might know the correct answer. I am not prepared to signup for their free trial yet and I don't think I can post questions on their user forum.

>

>The frameworks I have worked with in the past seem to be designed expecting that I will be editing one record at a time from a given table. If I attempt to add or edit another record in the same table without saving the first record I edited, I am forced to either save the changes or abandon the changes before I can move to and edit another record.

>

>I am a CPA and I need to be able to add or edit multiple debit and/or credit transactions and then save all of them wrapped in a single backend transaction. Does Strataframe allow this right out of the box?

>

>Sam




My answer on UT



Hi Sam



Long time no see. ( VFE Devcon - Vegas ? )



I want to say yes but "right out of the box" can be interpreted a lot of ways. The flexibility of SF is impressive to say the least and there are a lot of ways to wrap transactions. You can even snapshot a business object at any state and just roll back to that. but I want to get a definitive answer so i am posting your question on the SF forum and as soon as I get an answer directly from Microfour I'll post it here for you.
By Edhy Rijo - 3/22/2010

Hi Charles,



Yes everything is supported out of the box. Let me give you an example:



You can have a form with a many Business Objects as you want, related in a any way you want and be able to save them all in a single transaction or in several transactions or some within transactions and others not or any combination you could imagine to create.



StrataFrame does not require the parent record to be saved in order to create multiple children or grand children records. When a new record is created the PK value for the first one will be -1 and this value will be propagated to the related tables FK, so when saved it will update all with the auto-incremented value from the database. Also if you save a child business object which the parent has not been saved, StrataFrame will save all parent tables to ensure the reliability of the Primary/Foreign Key assignments.



StrataFrame is so flexible in that you can create forms as those in MS OutLook to handle a single transaction per form, so in the case of accounting you can have a form to do a debit/credit transaction for a single customer and if you need to work on another customer you can just create another instance of the form with another customer record.



PS

Of course the term "Out of the Box" does not mean that the developer does not have to program the logic required by the application's business rule BigGrin we have to do something besides using StrataFrame Hehe
By Dustin Taylor - 3/23/2010

Yep, Edhy's dead on!

The short answer is yes, you can edit multiple records in a BO before saving the business object. It will keep track of which records within the BO are modified/added/deleted and, when a save is triggered, will take the appropriate action for each row. As Edhy mentioned, this can be inside or outside of a database transaction (StrataFrame provides methods to begin, rollback, and commit a Transaction as necessary), and will handle child records (along with all of the associated foreign keys) for you!