Re: Merging beans for composite search

Responding to Vivoli...

I am pretty stuck with a composite search problem, which among the
others has the need of the following operation:

I have a bean representing the search criteria ( the search domain is
People objects, and I'm searching-by-example ), call them
PeopleSearchCriteria
that can be filled in with details of a person I am searching
( through setName() and the like )

Now I have two of these criteria, name them C1 and C2 ( spawning
disjoint sets S1  and S2 )
and I have to create a third one (C3) by merging the information
contained in each of them ( thus with a search set equal the union of
the two S3 = {S1 U S2} )

This sounds like you need to organize your compound criteria into a data structure where you can easily access (iterate over) the minimum sum of products. For example, a tree with the ORs all at the root:

                        [OR]
                          |
              +-----------+------------+
              |                        |
             [OR]                    [AND]
              |                        |
     +--------+--------+        +------+----------+
     |                 |        |                 |
[Age > 22]      [Name = XYZ]  [YOB > 1938]   [City = London]

     P1              P1        ----------- P3 --------------

The minimum sum of products is {P1, P2, P3} and the compound criteria is satisfied if any one of the products evaluates to TRUE. So your bean "walks" the leaves of the criteria tree in order of boolean products and evaluates each product's criterion against the People in hand.



The simple solution would be to go through every getter of S1 and S2
and set the respective setter of S3 when they return a value ( not null
), but the point is that I have like 70 properties to check and I don't
really like doing it...

Another possibility would be inserting a proxy recording the setters
that are called to fill the two criteria, but it happens that the class
structure is

       People
         ^
         |
PeopleSearchCriteria

Is this a subclassing relation? If so I don't understand how PeopleSearchCriteria IS-A People. They seem like two entirely different things.


*************
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H. S. Lahman
hsl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pathfinder Solutions  -- Put MDA to Work
http://www.pathfindermda.com
blog: http://pathfinderpeople.blogs.com/hslahman
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