Hey Floyd,
How is it going? I have been really enjoying the new MyThreads on the serverside. One thing it is still missing is the ability for the user to tag which threads he/she believes are *hot*. For instance, if a thread I am participating in has been "closed", the solution has been reached and both parties say "thanks, goodbye, etc..." that thread still shows up in MyThreads. It would be really sweet if I could mark the ones that I saw as *hot*. Just a suggestion. I know it will not be trivial. It will cause a change in the UI. The MyThreads wasn't too difficult though, was it? Just a findByOwnerOrParticpant(..)? But I see that a personalized MyThreads will cause a change in the Object model and the DB schema. Let me know what you think.

Chris

I hear you Chris,

  It would be cool to have a "hot threads" per user. Right now we have a global hot threads, its just a flag on our thread EJB.

   Having a personalized hot threads feature would require back end changes, how about architecting it with me. It sounds like we are looking at modeling a many to many relationship (many users can have many hot threads). So how would we go about implementing such a thing?

    It sounds like we could use a new entity bean to model this many to many relationship. It would model a users interest in a thread.

  thoughts?

Floyd

Floyd,
Eventhough it is a n-n relationship, I don't think that the threads need to be aware of their relationship to the users. We could add a List of threads to the user. The threads then can be retrieved as needed (lazily) by the user bean. It is really an attribute of the user, which threads he/she is interested in.
Let me know what you think.

Chris

hmm... I am thinking that I don't want to modify the existing database schema, I would rather add new tables. I also am lazy so I don't want to write serializing code to deal with lists maped to a one record in a row.

  What I was thinking was having an entity bean represent a "UsersHotThread". This entity bean has a threadPK, and a UserPK. There would be one of these beans for every thread a user is interested in.

   Doing it this way would be the easiest (though not necessarily the best performing). To get a users hot threads, you just do findByUser() on the UsersHotThreadBean or something like that. To mark a thread as hot, you just create the bean with a users PK and the threadPK as a parameter.

   This is a super simple way. I don't know if it is the best way, but it works.

  thoughts?

Floyd

Floyd,
You are right in that would be the simplest way. At first, that is how I was looking at it. A simple two-column table mapping users to threads. I do believe this will be the easiest way to do it. If you want me to do it, just send me the ejbJAR for the thread and users along w/ the interfaces and ddl and I will send you the UsersHotThread entity back.

Chris

Thanks for the offer Chris, but that won't be necessary (you writing the code). We plan to offer email subscription to forums and hot threads, so when I want to write the entity bean to include fields necessary for this feature once we begin implementation of it.

Floyd

Cool Floyd,
Keep me posted.

Chris