Is there a design pattern for transferring "partial" or related data objects?

Question

I am writing a program in Kotlin which parses some input data and writes it to a MySQL database (through JDBC).

The database includes tables such as users and each table has a corresponding data class representing the entity:

data class User(val id: Int, val surname: String, val forename: String, ...)

The users table has a primary key (the ID) which links it to other tables: I will call these the foos and bars tables, which have their associated data classes too. A user has a one-many relationship with "foo"s and "bar"s

I have classes for reading/writing to the database, such that when I do QueryManager.getAll(...) with the appropriate parameters I can get a list of User instances from the database.

However, when I am parsing input data, the ID of all items are unknown, so I cannot use the User class. Also I need to store a list of "foo"s and "bar"s associated to each user but without using the Foo and Bar classes.

At the moment I have something which can be simplified to this:

class UserDataHolder {

    // unknown userID
    val userSurname: String
    val userForename: String
    ...
    val relatedFoos: List<FooDataHolder>
}

class FooDataHolder {

    // unknown userID and fooID
    val fooProperty1: String
    val fooProperty2: Boolean
    ...
}

These are given to the database which then:
1. Uses the user properties to write to the users table, getting back the auto-increment ID
2. Adds foo data to the foos table using the user ID (but we don't know the foo ID) 3. Gets back the foo auto-increment ID to use for something else that it is linked to

Is there a common design pattern for transferring incomplete or related data like this, that I can learn about and implement in my program?

(E.g. I have read about the data transfer object on StackOverflow, this site and Martin Fowler's site but am unsure whether it is most suited here, as I am not currently aware of other patterns for similar/related problems.)

Edit: To clarify, I want to know what design patterns exist for solving a problem like this.

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 22 '20 at 08:33

This is not an actual design pattern, but if the only information missing in your software is the database-assigned id value of new data you are about to insert into the database, then I would just give those id fields a special marker value (like -1). That way, you can use the same class both for new objects and objects that already exist in the database.

And for links between related objects, use pointers/references rather than relying on foreign key relations from the database that may not yet have been established.

Is there a design pattern for transferring "partial" or related data objects?

1 Answers1