How do people handle foreign keys on clients when synchronizing to master db
- by excsm
Hi,
I'm writing an application with offline support. i.e. browser/mobile clients sync commands to the master db every so often.
I'm using uuid's on both client and server-side. When synching up to the server, the servre will return a map of local uuids (luid) to server uuids (suid). Upon receiving this map, clients updated their records suid attributes with the appropriate values.
However, say a client record, e.g. a todo, has an attribute 'list_id' which holds the foreign key to the todos' list record. I use luids in foreign_keys on clients. However, when that attribute is sent over to the server, it would dirty the server db with luids rather than the suid the server is using.
My current solution, is for the master server to keep a record of the mappings of luids to suids (per client id) and for each foreign key in a command, look up the suid for that particular client and use the suid instead.
I'm wondering wether others have come across thus problem and if so how they have solved it? Is there a more efficient, simpler way?
I took a look at this question "Synchronizing one or more databases with a master database - Foreign keys (5)" and someone seemed to suggest my current solution as one option, composite keys using suids and autoincrementing sequences and another option using -ve ids for client ids and then updating all negative ids with the suids. Both of these other options seem like a lot more work.
Thanks,
Saimon
