General question.. I have a situation where I am building a service to handle processing requests. These requests come from several client systems to handle to "different" objects, which are actually very close to identical. In particular, they do have one field which is identical in function but has different names in the source systems that we are fronting. For the purposes of this discussion let's say they are called Account Number in one system and Registration Number in a second system.
I have an account_table which is an example of horizontal inheritance. All the fields of both objects exist in his table. Originally the plan was to have two unrelated entities which shared the same table, but were not related by inheritance in java. This made things easy because I could just call the fields different names in different entities and they both referred to the same field in the table. Some use cases have come up that mean it would be valuable to have them related by inheritance in java as well. My problem now is how to deal with this attribute that is stored in the same column but has different names in the two entities. As I see it, I have a couple of choices and I'm looking for opinions on how to proceed. 1) I could just leave them as separate entities that share a table. This keeps the encapsulation strong and makes life simpler in some ways, but means anytime I search against one, I have to search against two. Not ideal, but manageable. if I go down this path, I will probably write two end points one for each entity. 2) Implement Inheritance and create a cover method, with the correct domain specific name, that references the inherited "common" field. This feels like a nightmare for writing queries and inserts. It has the advantage of maintaining domain level naming. 3) Bite the bullet and change the name to be consistent in the two objects and refactor a bunch of code. This feels clean to implement but also feels confusing for developers because semantically different fields share a name, in this system and no other. 4) Make the "parent" class specific to the use case that's causing the problem. Don't use inheritance. Just three entities that are all based on the same table. Write one piece of custom SQL that updates this object when it needs to be modified independent of the qualifier. uggh, Which of the four that I outlined would you suggest, or is there another idea that works better? Tony
