Java Data Objects

Verification at Commit

With optimistic transactions, instances queried or read from the datastore are not treated as transactional unless they are modified, deleted, or marked by the application as transactional. At commit time, the transactional datastore context is used for verification of inserted, deleted, and updated datastore instances involved in the transaction.

The verification algorithm is not part of the JDO specification, although updates to the same field in the same instance by different transactions must cause a verification failure. The verification can be implemented by different strategies, based on the support provided by different datastores:

• A JDO implementation might use a special timestamp field in each datastore instance and compare this field for verification. Some datastores provide a special timestamp type that automatically updates its value with every transaction that changes any value in the instance. If such a type is not available, an implementation might simply use an extra field, not visible to the application, to track these changes and manage the values itself.

• An implementation might use an application-specific set of fields whose values are compared.

• An implementation might allow your application to aggregate fields into groups and compare all of the values in each affected group to verify that no field in any group has changed.

• An implementation might allow you to choose a different policy for each persistent class in your model.

Thus, it is possible ...