Synthetic IDs

The serial field modifier causes the primary key value to be generated by the database (using an auto-number or sequence).

One challenge that this causes is the problem of seeding the database, since the primary key value is not known, and may not be the same value if run on different databases.

Let's consider our Customer and Address types. We have changed Customer to use `serial’

 type Customer struct {
  id int primaryKey serial
  name string
  relation addr Address one optional
 } end
 type Address struct {
  id int primaryKey
  relation cust Customer one 
  street string
  city string
  state string
 } end

Inserting the customer is easy:

 insert Customer { name: 'bob smith'}

But how to specify the address? There is no way to know what value for id the database generated.

 //THE FOLLOWING IS NOT CORRECT!!
 insert Address { id: 1, cust: ???, street: '101 Main St', city: 'Chicago', state: 'IL'} //this will fail

Synthetic IDs

Synthetic IDs are values that exist in Delia memory only (not the database), and are used to establish a correspondence between two rows being inserted into the database.

Synthetic IDs can be enabled for a type using the configure statement. All subsequent insert statements for that type can use the synthetic ID as if it were a normal field.

Then the other side of the relation can be inserted, mentioning the synthetic ID value. Delia will extract the primary key that was generated and use it.

 configure Customer.synthetic_id='synth_id'
 insert Customer { name: 'bob smith', synth_id: 1000}
 insert Address { id: 1, cust: 1000, street: '101 Main St', city: 'Chicago', state: 'IL'}