Question

I have an entity in my app engine datastore. There’s actually only one instance of this entity. I can see it in my admin console. Is it possible to add a new attribute to the entity via the admin console (using gql perhaps)?

Right now it looks something like:

Entity: Foo
Attributes:  mName,  mAge,  mScore

and I’d like to add a new boolean attribute to this entity like “mGraduated” or something like that.

In the worst case I can write some code to delete the entity then save a new one, but yeah was just wondering.

Thanks

——– Update ———

Tried adding the new attribute to my class (using java) and upon loading from the datastore I get the following:

java.lang.NullPointerException: 
  Datastore entity with kind Foo and key Foo(\"Foo\") has a null property named mGraduated.  
  This property is mapped to com.me.types.Foo.mGraduated, which cannot accept null values.

This is what my entity class looks like, I just added the new attribute (mGraduated), then deployed, then tried loading the single entity from the datastore (which produced the above exception):

@PersistenceCapable
public class Foo
{   
  @PrimaryKey
  private String k;

  /** Some old attributes, look like the following. */
  @Persistent
  @Extension(vendorName = "datanucleus", key = "gae.unindexed", value="true")
  private String mName;

  ... 

  /** Tried adding the new one. */
  @Persistent
  @Extension(vendorName = "datanucleus", key = "gae.unindexed", value="true")
  private boolean mGraduated;

Answer 1

You can’t do this through the admin console, but you shouldn’t have to delete the entity. Instead just update it- the Datastore does not enforce schemas for Kinds.
E.g., if Foo is a subclass of db.Model (Python), change your model subclass to include the new property; fetch the model instance (e.g., by its key), update the instance, including setting the value of the new field; and save the modified instance. Since you just have one instance this is easy. With many such instances to update you’d probably want to do this via task queue tasks or via a mapreduce job.