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Fetching Data

This chapter discusses the mechanics of retrieving data using Enterprise Objects.

It is divided into the following sections:

• “Objects Involved in Fetching” describes the objects involved in retrieving data.

• “Flow of Data During a Fetch” discusses the flow of data during a fetch.

• “Enterprise Object Initialization” discusses how enterprise objects instances are initialized.

• “Faulting and Relationship Resolution” describes how Enterprise Objects resolves relationships and uses faulting to improve performance.

• “Data Integrity Mechanisms” discusses some of the data integrity mechanisms Enterprise Objects uses while fetching data, including uniquing, faulting, and snapshotting.

• “Ensuring Fresh Data” discusses how Enterprise Objects caches fetched data, when it uses cached data, how to refetch data, how to clear the cache, and in general how to ensure that the enterprise object instances in your application contain fresh data.

• “Advanced Faulting” discusses advanced faulting topics such as deferred faulting and batch faulting.

• “Advanced Fetching” discusses advanced fetching topics such as raw row fetching and prefetching.

• “Common Delegate Usage” discusses delegates that are commonly implemented to customize fetching.

• “Constructing Fetch Specifications” teaches you how to build fetch specifications and how to construct qualifiers.

• “Filtering Fetch Results in Memory” teaches you how to filter the results of a fetch in memory.

• “Sorting Fetch Results in Memory” teaches you how to sort the results of a fetch in memory.

• “Accessing Database Keys” discusses how to access an entity’s primary and foreign keys when they are not class properties.

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