How do I make a copy of a view model? (10.1.3.4)

Question

I have an application where it is important to maintain records for multiple reasons even if they have been edited, inactivated, or deleted. They way my organization does this for edit is that if a record is modified, we leave that record as it is and change a status field, then create a new record with the new values. This is a common paradigm with many businesses.
We have decided that for some of our pages with multiple complex many-to-many relationships that instead of trying to handle this complexity at the time of committal, that it would be a lot easier just to duplicate our business model when entering the page in edit mode. The question is, is there any easy way to do that sticking with a model-centric view? How would I make duplicates of these views in the application module in such a way that I can roleback if an error occurs?
In short, the business requirement is that I have a page where if I click an edit button, it will bring up a copy an uncommitted new copy of the model. This copy needs to go away if the screen is navigated away from or some error happens during the commit.
If it helps, you can think of my page as the USERS, PRODUCTS, EXPERTISE_AREAS in the SRDemo schema. My USERS and PRODUCTS tables have an additional STATUS field that is initially active but gets set to ‘inactive’ when a modified version of it is committed. We have two views, one is a UserVO and the other is a ProductsExpertiseAreasVO with an associated viewlink using userId. The edit webpage shows some input fields for the attributes of the UserVO for a single userId and a table of the associated ProductsExpertiseAreasVOs.
Thank you,
- Joe
Edited by: JoeScheirich on Mar 16, 2010 9:53 AM

Answer 1

So without an easy way to do a proper deep clone that incorporated the extra logic needed in the child view create method, I made a custom AM method to do the cloning for me through calling create:
    public Key cloneParentVO(Key key) {
        Row[] parentRowArray = getParentVO().findByKey(key,1);
        ParentVORowImpl currentParentVORow = (ParentVORowImpl)parentRowArray[0];
        currentParentVORow.setStatus("ARCHIVE");
        // create a clone of the ParentVORow
        AttributeList attributeList = new AttributeListImpl();
        attributeList.setAttribute("Status", "ACTIVE");
        attributeList.setAttribute("ExpireNumOfDays", currentParentVORow.getExpireNumOfDays());
        ParentVORowImpl cloneParentVORow = (ParentVORowImpl)getParentVO().createAndInitRow(attributeList);
        // insert the new ParentVORow into the ParentVO
        getParentVO().insertRow(cloneParentVORow);
        // create a clone of all associated childVOs
        RowIterator childVORowIterator = currentParentVORow.getChildVO();
        childVORowIterator.reset();
        while(childVORowIterator.hasNext()) {
            childVORowImpl childVORow =
                (childVORowImpl)childVORowIterator.next();
            AttributeList attributeList2 = new AttributeListImpl();
            attributeList2.setAttribute("ParentUid", cloneParentVORow.getParentUid());
            attributeList2.setAttribute("Discount", childVORow.getDiscount());
            attributeList2.setAttribute("DiscountMethod", childVORow.getDiscountMethod());
            Row newchildVORowImpl =  cloneParentVORow.getchildVO().createAndInitRow(attributeList2);
            cloneParentVORow.getchildVO().insertRow(newchildVORowImpl);
         return cloneParentVORow.getKey();
    }Everything seems to work great and I can get the new parent view by the returned key and iterate through the new children through the view link accessor.
My problem now is that for reasons beyond my understanding, when I display the new parent and child views on a page, the new parent data displays, but the table that show the child data doesn’t have any rows though I can iterate through the child views just find if I throw in some debug code prior to the PrepareRenderer phase.
    public void prepareRender(LifecycleContext context) {
         MyAMImpl myAMImpl = (MyAMImpl)JSFUtils.getApplicationModuleForDataControl(AppConstants.ADMIN_AM);
         Key key = parentVOIter.getCurrentRow().getKey();
         Key newKey = myAMImpl.cloneCategoryVO(key);
         myAMImpl.getParentVO().findAndSetCurrentRowByKey(newKey, 1);
         super.prepareRender(context);
    }Anyone got any ideas?