Question

I have a DTO which can be fully loaded or lazy loaded using Lazy Load Pattern. How it is loaded depends on what the Flex Application needs. However, this DTO will be sent to a Flex application (swf). Normally, a collection for instance, will only be loaded when called. In my case however, the collection will only be called in Flex, so my implementation on the .NET side will obviously not work in this case (except if Flex would do a server call… something I would like to avoid).

In the getter of the collection, the data is retrieved from the database. If I would be working with ASP.NET pages, it would work, but not if the DTO is sent to Flex.

How would you deal with this? I could call the getter before sending the DTO to Flex, but that seems awful… + calling the getter can only be done if it is assigned to something (and the local variable that will hold the collection will never be used…).

Answer 1

I would probably introduce a Finalize method for the class and perhaps a FinalizeAll extension method for various collections of the class. This method would simply go through and reference all the getters on the public properties of the class to ensure that they are loaded. You would invoke Finalize (or FinalizeAll) before sending the object(s) to your Flex app. You might even want to make this an interface so that you can test for the need for finalization before transfering your objects and invoke the method based on a test for the interface rather than checking for each class individually.

NOTE: Finalize is just the first name that popped into mind. There may be (probably is) a better name for this.