How to serialize Objectify Entities with Ref<> attributes

Question

I have the following entity

class Student {
  String name;
  Ref<Course> course;

  public Course getCourse() { return course.get() }
}

I am trying to serialize the Student and put it in my custom Memcache. Serializing an entity with ref causes it to turn into dead ref. When i get the entity back from memcache How do i make sure that it fetches the recent data back from datastore.

TLDR: I am trying to serialize an deserialize objectify entity with Ref<> attribute. After i have deserialized them how to i ensure that the ref loads the value again from datastore? I dont want to clear the session cache for all entities.

stickfigure stickfigure · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-28T16:51:26

Can you use Key<?> instead? Then just load the keys as necessary instead of Ref.get().

Ref's serialization behavior is to actually serialize an object graph - for example, if you wanted to send a whole graph across the wire. It's not clear that this was the right choice, and maybe it's time to eliminate the DeadRef in v6. Thoughts?

How to serialize Objectify Entities with Ref<> attributes

1 Answers